


Green-Eyed Snake IV: Harry Potter and the Dark Mark

by Tathrin



Series: Green-Eyed Snake [4]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Book 4: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Gen, No character bashing, Slytherin Harry Potter, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-02
Updated: 2018-12-22
Packaged: 2018-12-30 12:49:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 35
Words: 222,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12109086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tathrin/pseuds/Tathrin
Summary: When the Triwizard Tournament comes to Hogwarts in Harry’s fourth year, he expects to be sitting in the stands with his fellow Slytherins, cheering on the school champion, but someone else has other plans in mind. Harry soon finds himself trapped in a dangerous, perhaps even deadly web of lies and secrets. With whispers of Voldemort’s growing strength haunting Harry’s dreams, who can he depend on to stand by him against dragons and darkness?





	1. The Scar

**Author's Note:**

> This is the fourth story in the _Green-Eyed Snake_ series, an AU story in which Harry Potter, due largely to meeting the Malfoys rather than the Weasleys while trying to get to platform nine-and-three-quarters, finds himself sorted into Slytherin. This fourth volume of Harry’s life as a Slytherin skips over the opening chapter, since those events happen unchanged, and picks up with Harry’s summer at the Dursleys’ with a subtly-altered retelling of the original second chapter stretching from pages sixteen to twenty-five of the original American hardcover printing.
> 
> As in the previous three stories, this piece will contain a great deal of the original text both in directly quoted sections and in altered or paraphrased pieces, and I make no pretense of claiming J.K. Rowling’s words as my own. In fact I think this volume might contain more direct quotes than any of the others. Because _Goblet of Fire_ is very much a story in which the plot drives Harry, rather than the other way around, most of the events in this story will happen exactly as they did in canon. The main difference in this story, then, will be not in what happens or when — since Harry will be able to do no more to prevent the events of the Triwizard Tournament from unfolding here than he could in canon — but rather in how Harry and his friends react to those same events. Differences will of course multiply based on these divergent acts, motivations, and decisions as the story goes along but for the most part the plot itself will not change since this is a story in which Harry is nothing but a participant along for the ride. If you’ll come along with me for this strange greenish twist on the _Goblet of Fire_ , however, I think you’ll find enough distinct alterations in terms of Harry’s character and personality, as well as those around him, to be entertained nonetheless as we tread some familiar ground — and familiar words — in a new, snakier way.
> 
> Thank you. I hope you enjoy.

Harry lay flat on his back, breathing hard as though he had been running. He had awoken from a vivid dream with his hands pressed over his face. The old scar on his forehead, which was shaped like a bolt of lightning, was burning beneath his fingers as though someone had just pressed a white-hot wire to his skin.

He sat up, one hand still on his scar, the other reaching out in the darkness for his glasses, which were on the bedside table. He put them on and his bedroom came into clearer focus, lit by a faint, misty orange light that was filtering through the curtains from the street lamp outside the window.

Harry ran his fingers over the scar again. It was still painful. He turned on the lamp beside him, scrambled out of bed, crossed the room, opened his wardrobe, and peered into the mirror on the inside of the door. A skinny boy of fourteen looked back at him, his bright green eyes puzzled under his untidy black hair. He examined the lightning-bolt scar of his reflection more closely. It looked normal, but it was still stinging.

Harry tried to recall what he had been dreaming about before he had awoken. It had seemed so real…. There had been two people he knew and one he didn’t…. He concentrated hard, frowning, trying to remember….

The dim picture of a darkened room came to him…. There had been a snake on a hearth rug…a small man called Peter, nicknamed Wormtail…and a cold, high voice…the voice of Lord Voldemort. Harry felt as though an ice cube had slipped down into his stomach at the very thought….

He closed his eyes tightly and tried to remember what Voldemort had looked like, but it was impossible…. All Harry knew was that at the moment when Voldemort’s chair had swung around, and he, Harry, had seen what was sitting in it, he had felt a spasm of horror, which had awoken him…or had that been the pain in his scar?

And who had the old man been? For there had definitely been an old man; Harry had watched him fall to the ground. It was all becoming confused. Harry put his face into his hands, blocking out his bedroom, trying to hold on to the picture of that dimly lit room, but it was like trying to keep water in his cupped hands; the details were now trickling away as fast as he tried to hold on to them…. Voldemort and Wormtail had been talking about someone they had killed, though Harry could not remember the name…and they had been plotting to kill someone else… _him!_

Harry took his face out of his hands, opened his eyes, and stared around his bedroom as though expecting to see something unusual there. As it happened, there were a number of extraordinary things in this room. A large wooden trunk stood open at the foot of his bed, revealing a cauldron, broomstick, black robes, and assorted spellbooks. Rolls of parchment littered that part of his desk that was not taken up by the large, empty cage in which his snowy owl, Hedwig, usually perched. On the floor beside his bed a book lay open; Harry had been reading it before he fell asleep last night. The pictures in this book were all moving. Women in dark green robes were zooming in and out of sight on broomsticks, throwing a red ball to one another.

Harry walked over to the book, picked it up, and watched one of the witches knock an opposing player in orange off his broom by whacking a heavy iron ball into his face. Then he snapped the book shut. Even Quidditch—in Harry’s opinion, the best sport in the world—couldn’t distract him at the moment. He placed _My History as a Harpy: A Witch’s Quidditch Memoir_ on his bedside table, crossed to the window, and drew back the curtains to survey the street below.

Privet Drive looked exactly as a respectable suburban street would be expected to look in the early hours of Saturday morning. All the curtains were closed. As far as Harry could see through the darkness, there wasn’t a living creature in sight, not even a cat.

And yet…and yet…Harry went restlessly back to the bed and sat down on it, running a finger over his scar again. It wasn’t the pain that bothered him; Harry was no stranger to pain and injury. He had once been buried alive in the collapse of a secret underground chamber. Only last year Harry had fallen fifty feet from an airborne broomstick. He was used to bizarre accidents and injuries; they were unavoidable if you attended Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and had a knack for attracting a lot of trouble.

No, the thing that was bothering Harry was that the last time his scar had hurt him, it had been because Voldemort—whom most everyone referred to as You-Know-Who or He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, because he was so terrifying that people even feared to speak his name—had been close by…. But He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named couldn’t be here, now…. The idea of Voldemort lurking in Privet Drive was absurd, impossible….

Harry listened closely to the silence around him. Was he half-expecting to hear the creak of a stair or the swish of a cloak? And then jumped slightly as he heard his cousin Dudley give a tremendous grunting snore from the next room.

Harry shook himself mentally; he was being stupid. There was no one in the house with him except Uncle Vernon, Aunt Petunia, and Dudley, and they were plainly still asleep, their dreams untroubled and painless.

Asleep was the way Harry liked the Dursleys best; it wasn’t as though they were ever any help to him awake. Uncle Vernon, Aunt Petunia, and Dudley were Harry’s only living relatives. They were Muggles who hated and despised magic in any form, which meant that Harry was about as welcome in their house as dry rot. They had explained away Harry’s long absences at Hogwarts over the last three years by telling everyone that he went to St. Brutus’s Secure Center for Incurably Criminal Boys. They knew perfectly well that, as an underage wizard, Harry wasn’t allowed to use magic outside Hogwarts, but they were still apt to blame him for anything that went wrong about the house. Harry had never been able to confide in them or tell them anything about his life in the Wizarding world. The very idea of going to them when they awoke, and telling them about his scar hurting him, and about his worries about Voldemort, was laughable.

And yet it was because of Voldemort that Harry had come to live with the Dursleys in the first place. If it hadn’t been for Voldemort, Harry would not have had the lightning scar on his forehead. If it hadn’t been for Voldemort, Harry would still have had parents….

Harry had been a year old the night that Voldemort—the most powerful Dark wizard for a century, a wizard who had been gaining power steadily for eleven years—arrived at his house and killed his father and mother. The Dark Lord had then turned his wand on Harry; he had performed the curse that had disposed of many full-grown witches and wizards in his steady rise to power—and, incredibly, it had not worked. Instead of killing the small boy, the curse had rebounded upon Voldemort. Harry had survived with nothing but a lightning-shaped cut on his forehead, and Voldemort had been reduced to something barely alive. His powers gone, his life almost extinguished, Voldemort had fled; the terror in which the secret community of witches and wizards had lived for so long had been lifted, the Dark Lord’s followers had disbanded, and Harry Potter had become famous.

It had been enough of a shock for Harry to discover, on his eleventh birthday, that he was a wizard; it had been even more disconcerting to find out that everyone in the hidden Wizarding world knew his name. Harry had arrived at Hogwarts to find that heads turned and whispers followed him wherever he went. But he was used to it now: At the end of this summer, he would be starting his fourth year at Hogwarts, and Harry was already counting the days until he would be back at the castle again.

But there was still a fortnight to go before he went back to school. He looked hopelessly around his room again, and his eye paused on the birthday cards his two best friends had sent him at the end of July. What would they say if Harry wrote to them and told them about his scar hurting?

At once, Draco Malfoy’s voice seemed to fill his head, drawling and languid.

_“I expect it was just a nightmare, Harry. Why on earth would your scar be hurting now? You’re stuck in the Muggle world, there can’t be anything interesting going on there, so don’t be mental! Look, if it’ll make you feel better I’ll see what father has to say, but I think you’re overreacting….”_

Mr. Malfoy was a clever, influential wizard with friends in high places and enough gold to buy a dozen more anytime he wanted them, but he didn’t have any particular expertise in the matter of curses as far as Harry knew. In any case, Harry didn’t like the idea of the Malfoys knowing that he, Harry, was worrying about He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Both of Draco’s parents were overprotective and Harry had already gotten their son into more than one dangerous situation. Harry was hoping that the Malfoys might invite him to stay any time now (Draco had mentioned something about the Quidditch World Cup), and he didn’t want them to think better of it because they were afraid he might bring trouble with him. Last year they had encouraged Draco to cut-off all contact with Harry because there had been rumors that someone was trying to kill him; he didn’t want them to have any hesitation about the safety of his company now.

And so he tried to imagine his other best friend, Hermione Granger’s, reaction, and in a moment, Hermione’s bushy brown hair and buck-toothed, serious face seemed to swim before Harry, followed by her shrill and panicky voice.

 _“Your scar hurt? Harry, that’s really serious….Write to Professor Dumbledore! And I’ll go and check_ Common Magical Ailments and Afflictions _….Maybe there’s something in there about curse scars….”_

Yes, that would be Hermione’s advice: Go straight to the headmaster of Hogwarts, and in the meantime, consult a book. Harry stared out of the window at the inky blue-black sky. He doubted very much whether a book could help him now. As far as he knew, he was the only living person to have survived a curse like Voldemort’s; it was highly unlikely, therefore, that he would find his symptoms listed in _Common Magical Ailments and Afflictions_. As for informing the headmaster, Harry had no idea where Dumbledore went during the summer holidays. He amused himself for a moment, picturing Dumbledore, with his long silver beard, full-length wizard’s robes, and pointed hat, stretched out on a beach somewhere, rubbing suntan lotion onto his long crooked nose. Wherever Dumbledore was, though, Harry was sure that Hedwig would be able to find him; Harry’s owl had never yet failed to deliver a letter to anyone, even without an address. But what would he write?

 _Dear Professor Dumbledore, Sorry to bother you, but my scar hurt this morning. Yours sincerely, Harry Potter_.

Even inside his head the words sounded stupid.

Harry kneaded his forehead with his knuckles. What he really wanted (and it felt almost shameful to admit it to himself) was someone like—someone like a _parent:_ an adult wizard whose advice he could ask without feeling stupid, someone who cared about him, who had had experience with Dark Magic….

And then the solution came to him. It was so simple, and so obvious, that he couldn’t believe it had taken so long— _Sirius_.

Harry leapt up from the bed, hurried across the room, and sat down at his desk; he pulled a piece of parchment toward him, loaded his eagle-feather quill with ink, wrote _Dear Sirius_ , then paused, wondering how best to phrase his problem, still marveling at the fact that he hadn’t thought of Sirius straight away. But then, perhaps it wasn’t so surprising—after all, he had only found out that Sirius was his godfather eight months ago.

There was a simple reason for Sirius’s complete absence from Harry’s life until then—Sirius had been in Azkaban, the terrifying wizard jail guarded by creatures called dementors, sightless, soul-sucking fiends who had come to search for Sirius at Hogwarts when he had escaped. Yet Sirius had been innocent—the murders for which he had been convicted had been committed by Wormtail, Voldemort’s supporter, whom nearly everybody now believed dead. Harry, Draco, Hermione, and his friends Crabbe and Goyle knew otherwise, however; Harry and Draco had come face-to-face with Wormtail briefly only the previous year, though only Professor Dumbledore had believed their story.

For a few glorious moments Harry had been teased by the idea that he might be leaving the Dursleys at last; Sirius had wanted to offer Harry a home once his name had been cleared, Harry was sure. But the chance had been snatched away from him—Wormtail had escaped before they could take him to the Ministry of Magic, and Sirius had had to flee for his life. Harry had helped him escape on his own precious broomstick, his Firebolt, which Sirius had in fact secretly gifted to him that very Christmas in a strange twist of irony, and since then, Sirius had been on the run. The home Harry might have had if Wormtail had not escaped had been haunting him all summer. It had been doubly hard to return to the Dursleys knowing that he had so nearly escaped them forever. Harry still had hope: he had convinced the Ministry to re-open Sirius’s case instead of just trying to hunt him down, and Draco had promised to have his father lend his influence to Sirius’s cause. Harry knew that Lucius Malfoy was good friends with Cornelius Fudge, the Minister of Magic, and had a lot of sway with the magical government. Correcting such a huge injustice took time though, so for now Sirius was in hiding and Harry was still with his Muggle relatives.

Between Mr. Malfoy and Sirius, however, that wasn’t quite as bad of a situation as it had been in previous years. Harry now had all his school things in his bedroom with him and could write to his friends whenever he wished. The Dursleys had never allowed this before; their general wish of keeping Harry as miserable as possible, coupled with their fear of his powers, had led them to lock up his trunk and owl in summers previous. But their attitude had changed since being visited by Mr. Malfoy who, while definitely weird and magical, was also very rich, and it had gotten even better than that since they had found out that Harry had a dangerous murderer for a godfather—for Harry had conveniently forgotten to tell them that Sirius was innocent.

Harry had received two letters from Sirius since he had been back at Privet Drive. Both had been delivered, not by owls (as was usual with wizards), but by large, brightly colored tropical birds. Hedwig had not approved of these flashy intruders; she had been most reluctant to allow them to drink from her water tray before flying off again. Harry, on the other hand, had liked them; they put him in mind of palm trees and white sand, and he hoped that, wherever Sirius was (Sirius never said, in case the letters were intercepted), he was enjoying himself. Somehow, Harry found it hard to imagine dementors surviving long in bright sunlight; perhaps that was why Sirius had gone south. While the Ministry had changed their hunt for him from “wanted—dead or alive” to “wanted for questioning,” they were still hunting for him, and despite Mr. Malfoy’s advice Sirius refused to turn himself in. Sirius’s letters, which were now hidden beneath the highly useful loose floorboard under Harry’s bed, sounded cheerful, and in both of them he had reminded Harry to call on him if ever Harry needed to. Well, he needed to now, all right….

Harry’s lamp seemed to grow dimmer as the cold gray light that precedes sunrise slowly crept into the room. Finally, when the sun had risen, when his bedroom walls had turned gold, and when sounds of movement could be heard from Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia’s room, Harry cleared his desk of crumpled pieces of parchment and reread his finished letter.

> _Dear Sirius,_
> 
> _Thanks for your last letter. That bird was enormous; it could hardly get through my window._
> 
> _Things are the same as usual here. Dudley’s diet isn’t going too well. My aunt found him smuggling doughnuts into his room yesterday. They told him they’d have to cut his pocket money if he keeps doing it, so he got really angry and chucked his PlayStation out of the window. That’s a sort of computer thing you can play games on. Bit stupid really, now he hasn’t even got_ Mega-Mutilation Part Three _to take his mind off things._
> 
> _I’m okay, mainly because the Dursleys are terrified you_ _or Mr. Malfoy might turn up and turn them all into bats if I ask you to. Draco tells me his dad hasn’t gotten a lot of progress out of the Ministry, but that that’s to be expected when dealing with judicial bureaucracy, and not to despair. No one’s found any sign of Pettigrew but people are looking so it’s probably only a matter of time._
> 
> _A weird thing happened this morning, though. My scar hurt again. Last time that happened it was because Voldemort was at Hogwarts. But I don’t reckon he can be anywhere near me now, can he? Do you know if curse scars sometimes hurt years afterward?_
> 
> _I’ll send this off with Hedwig when she gets back; she’s off hunting at the moment. Don’t get sunburned!  
>  _ _Harry_

Yes, thought Harry, that looked all right. There was no point putting in the dream; he didn’t want it to look as though he was too worried. He folded up the parchment and laid it aside on his desk, ready for when Hedwig returned. Then he got to his feet, stretched, and opened his wardrobe once more. Without glancing at his reflection, he started to get dressed before going down to breakfast.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have made one non-Slytherin-centric deviation from the original text: in the initial publication of _Goblet of Fire_ , it says that Harry found out that Sirius was his god-father **two months ago** but this is untrue; he actually learned that fact eight months ago, when he was eavesdropping on Fudge, McGonagall, Hagrid, and Flitwick. (He _met_ Sirius two months ago in canon, but he knew he was his godfather prior to that.) I have chosen to correct this error, despite my general policy of cleaving strictly to the original text when quoting, because it is a simple and obvious fix and not something that is likely to cause inconsistencies later. Apologies for any confusion!


	2. The Invitation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This section begins with an excerpt from Chapter Three starting on page twenty-six of the American hardcover. Additional excerpted segments from the remainder of that chapter are scattered throughout the section. No large chunks of story have been omitted despite possible repetitiveness of text due to the necessity of illustrating the differences between the canon scenario and that which plays out here. I apologize to those who may find this familiar beginning tedious to slog-through. Feel free to skip over it and come back next chapter!
> 
> TRIGGER WARNING: Uncle Vernon uses some offensive terminology at the start of this chapter. It's the same as in canon so it shouldn't be a surprise -- I just didn't want anyone to be caught off-guard in case they didn't remember that it was coming!

By the time Harry arrived in the kitchen, the three Dursleys were already seated around the table. None of them looked up as he entered or sat down. Uncle Vernon’s large red face was hidden behind the morning’s _Daily Mail_ , and Aunt Petunia was cutting a grapefruit into thirds, her lips pursed over her horselike teeth.

Dudley looked furious and sulky, and somehow seemed to be taking up even more space than usual. This was saying something, as he always took up an entire side of the square table by himself. When Aunt Petunia put a third of unsweetened grapefruit onto Dudley’s plate with a tremulous “There you are, Diddy darling,” Dudley glowered at her. His life had taken a most unpleasant turn since he had come home for the summer with his end-of-year report.

Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia had managed to find excuses for his bad marks as usual: Aunt Petunia always insisted that Dudley was a very gifted boy whose teachers didn’t understand him, while Uncle Vernon maintained that “he didn’t want some swotty little nancy boy for a son anyway.” They also skated over the accusations of bullying in the report—“He’s a boisterous little boy, but he wouldn’t hurt a fly!” Aunt Petunia had said tearfully.

However, at the bottom of the report there were a few well-chosen comments from the school nurse that not even Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia could explain away. No matter how much Aunt Petunia wailed that Dudley was big-boned, and that his poundage was really puppy fat, and that he was a growing boy who needed plenty of food, the fact remained that the school outfitters didn’t stock knickerbockers big enough for him anymore. The school nurse had seen what Aunt Petunia’s eyes—so sharp when it came to spotting fingerprints on her gleaming walls, and in observing the coming and going of her neighbors—simply refused to see: that far from needing extra nourishment, Dudley had reached roughly the size and weight of a young killer whale.

So—after many tantrums, after arguments that shook Harry’s bedroom floor, and many tears from Aunt Petunia—the new regime had begun. The diet sheet that had been sent by the Smeltings school nurse had been taped to the fridge, which had been emptied of all Dudley’s favorite things—fizzy drinks and cakes, chocolate bars and burgers—and filled instead with fruit and vegetables and the sorts of things that Uncle Vernon called “rabbit food.” To make Dudley feel better about it all, Aunt Petunia had insisted that the whole family follow the diet too.

Harry had not been about to put up with this. He had spent his whole childhood having to tolerate Dudley swiping the best bits of whatever he was eating, whether he was hungry or not, just because he could. He wasn’t about to survive a summer on carrot sticks, especially once he’d realized that Aunt Petunia seemed to feel that the best way to keep up Dudley’s morale was to make sure that he did, at least, get more to eat than Harry.

So Harry had written two letters, one to Draco and one to Sirius, complaining about the fact that he was being starved to death and couldn’t they do something about it? He hadn’t actually sent either letter; instead he had left them lying around, half finished, in the living room, where Aunt Petunia was sure to see them. She could not abide clutter and was even less capable of resisting the urge to pry into other people’s business. Harry had barely had time to amble casually out of the room, yawning theatrically, before he heard the rustle of parchment as she swooped down upon his letters. Harry had enjoyed the argument that followed: Uncle Vernon had insisted that if “that boy” wasn’t going to have to follow the diet he bloody well wasn’t going to either, while Aunt Petunia had maintained that “that boy” could jolly well feed himself if he liked, but the rest of them were going to do their best to support their Duddykins.

In the end she had won, and Harry had been given free access to the kitchen. Of course, there was nothing in the house now but healthy stuff and Aunt Petunia wasn't about to go shopping for anything else on Harry's behalf, but at least Harry could eat as much of it as he wanted. He did his best to make it as unhealthy as possible too, pouring sugar over his granola and smothering his fruit with honey. He had to be careful not to do too much of that where Aunt Petunia could see him, for risk of her forbidding him to touch the sugar bowl or honey jar, but he got enough satisfaction from eating sugary snacks in front of Dudley during the day to forgo sweetening at family mealtimes.

Now he ignored the grapefruit that the Dursleys were sharing and poked through the refrigerator until he had assembled a glorious fruit salad of strawberries, blackberries, and crisp green apples. He hummed cheerfully to himself as he chopped his apple, keeping his head down so that Aunt Petunia couldn’t see his smug grin. He could practically feel Dudley’s beady little eyes boring into him as he prepared the large, heaping bowl of fruit that would be his breakfast. It wasn’t as good as a proper fry-up of course, but it was sweetened by spite—not just from Dudley, but Uncle Vernon as well, who flashed Harry a surly, jealous look before he laid aside his paper with a deep sniff of disapproval and looked down at his own grapefruit third.

“Is this it?” he said grumpily to Aunt Petunia.

Aunt Petunia gave him a severe look, and then nodded pointedly at Dudley, who had already finished his own grapefruit third and was eyeing his father’s with a very sour look in his piggy little eyes.

Uncle Vernon gave a great sigh, which ruffled his large, bushy mustache, and picked up his spoon.

There was a knock at the window. Uncle Vernon looked up and his face went red. There was an owl—a large, magnificent owl, with great horned peaks in its feathers—tapping at the glass. “BOY!” he bellowed. Harry jumped up, confused; normally owls knew to come right to his bedroom, and he had never seen this one before.

He hurried to the window and opened it. The owl hopped inside before Harry could stop it. Aunt Petunia made a strange, strangled noise. A loud snapping sound was the blade of the knife in her hand breaking off from the handle. Harry bit his lip to keep from grinning; he remembered the last time Aunt Petunia’s sterile kitchen had been breached by owls. He didn’t dare let the Dursleys see him smile though; he would be in for enough of an earful about the owl delivering to the main part of the house as it was.

Harry reached for the letter but the owl moved away, giving him a dirty look. Harry frowned and grabbed for it again but again the owl dodged; it hooted disapprovingly and turned toward Aunt Petunia. She backed away as though it might be about to attack. The owl clattered its beak with annoyance and hopped off the counter. It soared across the room without bothering to beat its wings and landed on the table in front of Uncle Vernon.

Looking like he was about to have some sort of apoplexy, he snatched the letter from the owl. It hooted at him and flew back out the window while Aunt Petunia squawked with dismay and ran for her cleaning supplies. Harry winced and sidled over to Uncle Vernon, wondering whether he dared ask for the letter or if it would be better to wait until his uncle threw it at him.

Instead of yelling at Harry, Uncle Vernon stared at the letter in his hand, his eyes bulging. The envelope was a glittery gold material that shimmered almost like real metal. Eventually Uncle Vernon reached for a knife and slit the letter open jerkily. Harry started to protest: “You can’t open that, that’s mine—”

Uncle Vernon rounded on him, as if he had been waiting for just this opening. “Oh it is, is it?” he shouted. “Yours, is it? When it’s got my name on it, eh? When it’s addressed to me? And just what is one of _your lot_ doing writing to _me_ , eh? EH?”

“I don’t know,” said Harry, made surly and short-tongued by shock, “why don’t you read it and find out?”

Uncle Vernon glowered at him then, reluctantly, as if he might be giving away something he didn’t mean to, he lowered his eyes to the letter. He didn’t notice Dudley leaning across the table to spear the remains of his grapefruit.

Aunt Petunia bustled back in, rubber gloves on, spray bottle and bleach rag in hand, and stopped dead at the sight of Uncle Vernon reading the letter. She squeaked in dismay and scurried around the table to read over his shoulder. Harry remained at his other side, glaring. None of them noticed as Dudley began to help himself to Harry’s fruit salad.

“So,” Uncle Vernon said at last, lowering the letter and looking up at Harry furiously. _“So.”_

“So what?” said Harry boldly. Uncle Vernon thrust the letter into Harry’s hands.

Harry looked down at it. The parchment was thick, expensive stuff, edged with gold. The handwriting was elegant; each capital letter began with at least three unnecessary curls, although the following letters had been formed with deliberate plainness, as though the author wasn’t sure that a more elaborate script would be legible to the recipients. Harry stared at the first curly flourish and began to read aloud:

> _To: Mr. and Mrs. Dursley,_
> 
> _You will I have no doubt recall meeting my husband, but permit me to introduce myself to you now: Narcissa Malfoy, mother of Draco Malfoy, whom I am sure you have heard much of from your nephew, Harry Potter, as the boys are great friends._
> 
> _Possibly you may be aware that Ireland has secured the honor of hosting the 422 nd Quidditch World Cup this summer. We will of course be attending, for it is an event not to be missed, and the chance to represent England in front of the international community is a duty that every proper witch and wizard must rejoice in meeting. Tickets are thus quite difficult to come by, and so it is our pleasure to offer young Harry a chance to attend with us, with your permission of course._
> 
> _One never knows quite how long these events will last, and so to make things simpler for everyone involved, we believe it would be best if Harry were turned over to our care for the remainder of the summer. We will be delighted to help him finish any preparations for school he has yet to complete and to accompany him to the train back to Hogwarts School at the end of the season with our own dear Draco._
> 
> _The match begins this Monday so we will come to collect Harry at your earliest possible convenience. I do apologize for the lack of notice, but we had initially secured only three tickets to the match, and getting the Minister’s box rearranged so that Harry would be sure to sit with us took the petty bureaucrats in charge of such tedious niceties much longer than we anticipated. All has now been arranged to full satisfaction however, so you need have no worries about Harry’s situation at the match._
> 
> _Please do send your answer back in the ordinary way; I hear that there is such a thing as Muggle post, but I fear that there is no means of Muggle delivery that would be able to find its way to our estate, and I would hate for your answer to be lost or delayed. The idea that poor dear Harry might miss out on such a lovely event due to a mix-up in mailing methods simply tears at my heart and both my husband and I would be most distressed were such a thing to occur._
> 
> _Most Cordially,_
> 
> _Narcissa Malfoy_

It took Harry a few minutes to swallow down the laughter that bubbled in his throat. Finally he looked up with a carefully neutral expression and met Uncle Vernon’s eyes. “So—can I go then?” he asked.

A slight spasm crossed Uncle Vernon’s large purple face. The mustache bristled. Harry thought he knew what was going on behind the mustache: a furious battle as two of Uncle Vernon’s most fundamental instincts came into conflict. Allowing Harry to go would make Harry happy, something Uncle Vernon had struggled against for thirteen years. On the other hand, allowing Harry to disappear to the Malfoys’ for the rest of the summer would get rid of him two weeks earlier than anyone could have hoped, and Uncle Vernon hated having Harry in the house.

Looking up past Uncle Vernon’s shoulder, Harry saw a similar struggle playing out across Aunt Petunia’s horsey face: on the one hand, she was instinctively eager to ingratiate herself with anyone of greater money or class than she had, and the Malfoys clearly had both, a fact that was underscored by both the ostentatious letter and the arrogant, presumptive tone of the invitation. On the other hand, it was Harry that the Malfoys were interested in, not Petunia, and she couldn’t stand the thought of other people getting to schmooze with the rich and famous in her place. Besides, they were wizards, which countered most of the benefits of their obvious wealth and position.

Uncle Vernon looked up and met Aunt Petunia’s eyes; she drew her lips back in a toothy grimace. To give himself thinking time, it seemed, Vernon looked down at Mrs. Malfoy’s letter again.

“Who is this woman?” he said, staring at the elegant signature with distaste.

“You’ve seen her at the train station,” said Harry. “She’s my friend Draco’s mother, she’s married to Mr. Malfoy. You remember him. He came here the year before last to find out why I wasn’t on the Hog—on the train to school.”

He had almost said “Hogwarts Express,” and that was a sure way to get his aunt and uncle’s temper up. Nobody ever mentioned the name of Harry’s school aloud in the Dursley household.

Uncle Vernon flinched and Aunt Petunia shivered; they weren’t about to forget Lucius Malfoy’s visit any time soon, even if Harry’s escaped-convict-godfather was a better name to threaten them with these days. “Tall woman,” Uncle Vernon said, struggling to sound disinterested, “blonde hair, lots of jewels.”

He cleared his throat and looked down at the letter again.

“Quidditch,” he muttered under his breath. “ _Quidditch_ —what is this rubbish?”

Harry felt a stab of annoyance.

“It’s a sport,” he said shortly. “Played on broom—”

“All right, all right!” said Uncle Vernon loudly. Harry saw, with some satisfaction, that his uncle looked vaguely panicky. Apparently his nerves couldn’t stand the sound of the word “broomsticks” in his kitchen. “Why did you ask if you didn’t want to know?” Harry baited him.

Aunt Petunia shot Harry a dirty look. “Don’t be impertinent,” she snapped.

Uncle Vernon took refuge in perusing the letter again. Harry saw his lips form the words “do send your answer back…in the ordinary way.” He scowled.

“What does she mean, ‘the ordinary way’?” he spat.

“Ordinary for us,” said Harry, and before his uncle could stop him, he added, “you know, owl post. Like how this letter was delivered. That’s what’s ordinary for wizards. She’s probably afraid you’ll try to put it through the Muggle post, and I expect the postman hasn’t the faintest idea where the Malfoys’ manor is.”

Uncle Vernon looked as outraged as if Harry had just uttered a disgusting swearword; Aunt Petunia’s eyes glittered avariciously at the mention of a manor. Shaking with anger and greed respectively, they both shot a nervous look through the window that the owl had departed by, as though expecting to see some of the neighbors leaning through the opening to eavesdrop.

“How many times do I have to tell you not to mention that unnaturalness under my roof?” Uncle Vernon hissed, his face now a rich plum color. “You stand there, in the clothes Petunia and I have put on your ungrateful back—”

“Only after Dudley finished with them,” said Harry coldly, and indeed, he was dressed in a sweatshirt so large for him that he had had to roll back the sleeves five times so as to be able to use his hands, and which fell past the knees of his extremely baggy jeans.

“I will not be spoken to like that!” said Uncle Vernon, trembling with rage.

But Harry wasn’t going to stand for this. Gone were the days when he had been forced to take every single one of the Dursleys’ stupid rules. He wasn’t following Dudley’s diet, and he wasn’t going to let Uncle Vernon stop him from going to the Quidditch World Cup, and he wasn’t going to be dressed like a slob when he got there, not if he could help it.

“Well I expect there will be a lot of people saying things like that when they see what I’m wearing at the Cup,” Harry said, “since I bet I’ll be the only person sitting in the Minister’s box wearing hand-me-downs that don’t fit right. Of course, I can always tell them that this is just the style in the Muggle world, that everybody dresses like bag-ladies. They’ll probably believe me.” Harry shrugged, as though it didn’t matter.

Aunt Petunia gave a wobbly little gasp at the idea that rich people would be criticizing how she ran her household. Her thin face turned red.

Uncle Vernon waved that argument away; he didn’t care what Harry dressed like or what people said about him because of it, as long as Harry was the one who had to listen to it. He did care about other things though, so Harry continued steadily:

“That is, _if_ you let me go. I suppose you don’t have to. Could you make up your mind quick, though? I’ll need to write back to the Malfoys right away if it’s a yes, and if it’s not, well, then I guess I’ll just go finish the letter I was writing to Sirius. You know—my godfather.”

He had done it. He had said the magic words. Now he watched the purple recede blotchily from Uncle Vernon’s face, making it look like badly mixed black currant ice cream. Aunt Petunia twitched and snatched the letter from Uncle Vernon’s nerveless fingers. She hid her face behind the heavy parchment, which had the added benefit of letting her inspect the gold leaf more closely. Harry wasn’t worried; he had a feeling that whatever the Malfoys had used, whether it was real gold or a spell, Aunt Petunia wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

“You’re—you’re writing to him, are you?” said Uncle Vernon, in a would-be calm voice—but Harry had seen the pupils of his tiny eyes contract with sudden fear.

“Well—yeah,” said Harry, casually. “It’s been a while since he heard from me, and, you know, if he doesn’t, he might start thinking something’s wrong.”

He stopped there to enjoy the effect of these words. Aunt Petunia flinched again, the letter falling from the loose grip of her rubber-gloved fingers, and she dived to the floor to retrieve it. Harry ignored her awkward scrambling to pick up the stiff parchment with her thick gloves. He could almost see the cogs working under Uncle Vernon’s thick, dark, neatly parted hair. If he tried to stop Harry writing to Sirius, Sirius would think Harry was being mistreated. If he told Harry he couldn’t go to the Quidditch World Cup, Harry would write and tell Sirius, who would _know_ Harry was being mistreated. (And then there was the polite threat at the end of Narcissa Malfoy’s letter.) There was only one thing for Uncle Vernon to do. Harry could see the conclusion forming in his uncle’s mind as though the great mustached face were transparent. Harry let himself smile; let his uncle see that he, Harry, knew that he had won.

“Well, all right then. You can go to this ruddy…this stupid…this World Cup thing. You write and tell these—these _Malfoys_ they’re to pick you up, mind. I haven’t got time to go dropping you off all over the country. And you can spend the rest of the summer there. And you can tell your—your godfather…tell him…tell him you’re going.”

“Vernon!” exclaimed Aunt Petunia, coming up red-faced with the letter clutched gingerly between her rubber-covered palms.

“What!” Uncle Vernon cried defensively. Aunt Petunia scowled at him, pouted at the letter, and then scowled at Harry.

“Okay then,” said Harry brightly.

He turned and walked toward the kitchen door, fighting the urge to jump into the air and whoop. He was going…he was going to the Malfoys’, he was going to watch the Quidditch World Cup!

At the edge of the table he paused, looked down at the fruit salad that Dudley was halfway done with, and cleared his throat. Dudley looked up, his expression belligerent. His mother squawked when she saw her precious Duddy-kins eating food he wasn’t supposed to have and she swooped down, giving him the closest thing to a scolding she could manage. Harry snagged the bowl of fruit one-handed and chuckled all the way out of the kitchen and up the stairs to his bedroom.

Inside he saw that Hedwig wasn’t alone: a tawny eagle owl was bent over her water dish, helping himself. Hedwig ruffled up her feathers when she saw Harry but Harry knew she was just playing things up in hopes of getting more treats; she was used to Bowman, Draco’s owl, and the two of them usually got along.

Harry found the letter that Bowman had dropped neatly on his pillow, tore it open, and began to read. It was a lot less fancy than the one the Dursleys had been sent, and the loopy handwriting inside was sloppy rather than stilted:

> _Harry,_
> 
> _Did the Muggles like their letter? It took mother three drafts to come up with something that she thought they’d be able to understand. Did you have to translate much?_
> 
> _I assume they agreed to let you come, not that it makes much difference; we’ll come and fetch you on Sunday at three o’clock either way. I suppose you’d best let us know what their answer is so father will know what to expect when he gets there._
> 
> _I almost hope they said no just to see their faces when he shows up and tells them otherwise!_
> 
> _Draco_

Harry seized his eagle-feather quill once more, grabbed a fresh piece of parchment, and wrote:

> _Draco, it’s all okay, the Muggles say I can come. See you at three o’clock tomorrow. Can’t wait._
> 
> _Harry_

He folded this note up, tied it to Bowman’s leg, and scratched the large owl’s beak affectionately. The moment the note was secure Bowman hopped up onto the windowsill, hooted farewell, and flung himself out into the air, big wings spreading wide. He soared off down the street and out of sight.

Harry turned to Hedwig.

“Feeling up to a long journey?” he asked her.

Hedwig hooted in a dignified sort of way.

“Can you take this to Sirius for me?” he said, picking up his letter. “Hang on…I just want to finish it.”

He unfolded the parchment and hastily added a postscript.

> _If you want to contact me, I’ll be at my friend Draco Malfoy’s for the rest of the summer. His parents have got us tickets for the Quidditch World Cup!_

Harry debated saying more; he knew that Sirius had strained relations with his family, and the Malfoys were related to him through Draco’s mother, Sirius’s cousin; consequently his godfather wasn’t very fond of either of Draco’s parents—or of the fact that Harry was friends with him. There didn’t seem to be anything else to say that wouldn’t sound like he was trying to apologize for who his friends were, so Harry left it at that. The letter finished, he tied it to Hedwig’s leg; she kept unusually still, as though determined to show-off her own delivery skills in the wake of Bowman’s visit.

“I’ll be at Draco’s when you get back, all right?” Harry told her.

She nipped his finger affectionately, then, with a soft swooshing noise, spread her enormous wings and soared out of the open window.

Harry watched her out of sight, then dragged his trunk over to his bed and dumped all of the clothes in his wardrobe down next to it. He started sorting through the mess, trying to decide what to pack while he nibbled idly on his bowl of chopped fruit. Most of the time at Hogwarts he wore his school robes over his clothes so it hardly mattered, but if he was going to spend two weeks at the Malfoys’, some of that at the Quidditch World Cup, he would need to be a little more prepared.

Harry hadn’t really expected his barb about hand-me-downs to work, but he discovered, much to his surprise, that Aunt Petunia had taken it to heart. An hour after lunch he found himself bundled into the backseat of the car and dragged to the nearest Primark. There he had the dubious pleasure of watching Aunt Petunia struggle between not wanting to waste any money on him, and wanting to dress him up in finery that would impress the Malfoys and their rich friends.

Part of Harry—the part that was annoyed at having to spend his time clothes shopping with Aunt Petunia—wanted to tell her that she might as well give up; even if she spent a fortune on him she’d still be dressing him in Muggle clothes, which meant the Malfoys and their friends would think he looked ridiculous. The other part of him enjoyed watching the struggle, and didn’t mind getting some nice clothes out of it, even if they weren’t the sort of things he would have chosen. They were better than Dudley’s oversized hand-me-downs, at least.

When he got home he had to repack his trunk to make room for the new clothes, but the chore didn’t bother him. Harry folded his new shirts and trousers cheerfully, savoring the happiness that was flooding through him. He had new clothes, and Dudley had nothing but grapefruit; it was a bright summer’s day, he would be leaving Privet Drive tomorrow, his scar felt perfectly normal again, and he was going to watch the Quidditch World Cup. It was hard, just now, to feel worried about anything—even Lord Voldemort.


	3. The Portkey

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter opens with an edited excerpt from the start of Chapter Four beginning on page thirty-nine of the American hardcover and then jumps ahead to cherry-pick some additional relevant segments from the end of Chapter Six over pages seventy-two through seventy-four. Much of the explanatory details of the Quidditch World Cup and the background of Portkeys has been truncated and omitted on the basis of it being both irrelevant to re-state here as well as information so common-place to the Malfoys’ lives that they would likely not think to elaborate on it for Harry’s benefit. If you find the lack of exposition confusing at any point I apologize; please refer back to the original text or consult the Harry Potter Lexicon for any necessary clarification.

By twelve o’clock the next day, Harry’s school trunk was packed with his school things, his new clothes, and all his most prized possessions—the Invisibility Cloak he had inherited from his father, the flying goggles he had gotten from Draco, the broomstick he had gotten from Sirius, the enchanted map of Hogwarts he had been given by Fred and George Weasley last winter to settle a debt. He had emptied his hiding place under the loose floorboard of all traces of Sirius, double-checked every nook and cranny of his bedroom for forgotten spellbooks or quills, and taken down the chart on the wall counting down the days to September the first, on which he liked to cross off the days remaining until his return to Hogwarts.

The atmosphere inside number four, Privet Drive was extremely tense. The imminent arrival at their house of a couple of wizards was making the Dursleys uptight and irritable. Uncle Vernon had looked downright alarmed when Harry informed him that the Malfoys would be arriving at three o’clock the very next day.

“I hope you told them to dress properly, these people,” he snarled at once. “None of those stupid robes and dresses like they wear at the train station. They’d better have the decency to put on normal clothes, that’s all.”

Harry knew that was mostly bluster, because even if Uncle Vernon had dared to stand up to Mr. Malfoy he wouldn’t have got very far, but he felt a slight sense of foreboding nonetheless. He had never seen Draco wear anything other than robes, even on the week-ends, and he couldn’t picture Mr. and Mrs. Malfoy in Muggle clothes. Harry wasn’t bothered about what the neighbors would think, but he didn’t want the Dursleys to say anything that might offend the Malfoys.

Uncle Vernon had put on his best suit. To some people this might have looked like a gesture of welcome, but Harry knew it was because Uncle Vernon wanted to look impressive and intimidating. Dudley, on the other hand, looked somehow diminished. This was not because the diet was at last taking effect, but due to fright. Dudley had emerged from his last encounter with a fully-grown wizard with a curly pig’s tail poking out of the seat of his trousers, and Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon had had to pay for its removal at a private hospital in London. It wasn’t altogether surprising, therefore, that Dudley kept running his hand nervously over his backside, and walking sideways from room to room, so as not to present the same target to the enemy.

Lunch was an almost silent meal. Dudley didn’t even protest at the food (cottage cheese and grated celery). Aunt Petunia wasn’t eating anything at all. Her arms were folded, her lips were pursed, and she seemed to be chewing her tongue, as though biting back the furious diatribe she longed to throw at Harry.

“They’ll be driving, of course?” Uncle Vernon barked across the table. “Or will they be coming in some kind of chariot drawn by more of those ruddy owls?” He gave a forced laugh. Yesterday’s delivery was still pinching at Uncle Vernon’s nerves, and he wasn’t alone; Aunt Petunia had cleaned the kitchen four times but she still peeked in the corners and under the cupboards for signs of a stray feather. If there was such a sport as owl-hunting, Harry suspected that all three Dursleys would have taken it up.

“Er,” said Harry.

He had never heard any of his magical friends talk about cars, and he was sure that if the Malfoys had had a fancy automobile—and he couldn’t imagine them having any other kind—Draco would have found a way to brag about it. While the idea of owls drawing a chariot was ridiculous, other ideas—like hippogriffs pulling a flying brougham, or even one of the horseless carriages like were used at Hogwarts—seemed like definite possibilities. He settled for saying coldly, “I didn’t ask.”

Uncle Vernon snorted into his mustache but his cheeks went a little pale.

Harry spent most of the afternoon in his bedroom; he couldn’t stand watching Aunt Petunia peer out through the net curtains every few seconds, as though there had been a warning about an escaped rhinoceros. Finally, at a quarter to three, Harry went back downstairs and into the living room.

Aunt Petunia was compulsively straightening cushions. Uncle Vernon was pretending to read the paper, but his tiny eyes were not moving, and Harry was sure he was really listening with all his might for the sound of an approaching car. Dudley was crammed into an armchair, his porky hands beneath him, clamped firmly around his bottom. Harry couldn’t take the tension; he left the room and went and sat on the stairs in the hall, his eyes on his watch and his heart pumping fast from excitement and nerves.

At three o’clock precisely, just as the clock in the living room began to issue its shrill chimes, a very loud CRACK came from the other side of the front door. A moment later someone knocked on the frame. Harry jumped to his feet but Uncle Vernon got to the door first, wrenching it open as though hoping to catch the person on the other side off-balance so they would fall.

Instead it was Uncle Vernon who wobbled unsteadily, backing away as two elegantly-robed figures swept inside past him. Harry recognized Draco and his father and grinned. They looked very alike, with the same white-blonde hair and cold gray eyes, although Mr. Malfoy was both taller and broader in the shoulders than his son. Unlike the expression of haughty disdain his father was wearing, Draco was peering around at everything with a sort of horrified fascination.

“Won’t you come inside,” Uncle Vernon grated out belatedly, jerking a hand toward the living room.

“Yes, I do suppose we must,” Mr. Malfoy said, hardly looking at Uncle Vernon. “Good afternoon, Harry.”

Harry grinned. “Good afternoon, sir,” he said politely. “Hi Draco.”

Mr. Malfoy swept into the living room, his son on his heels. Harry hopped down the steps and followed the Malfoys. Uncle Vernon stalked in behind him, close enough to breathe on the back of Harry’s neck. Aunt Petunia was standing by the couch with a terrible grimace on her face; Harry supposed she thought it was a smile. Dudley had pressed himself as far back in the cushions as he would go. His mother had one hand clenched on his broad shoulder. Harry wasn’t sure if she was trying to prod him to his feet so he could greet their guests properly, or if she was holding him down in the chair where he was safe.

Harry had to work very hard not to laugh.

“This is your house?” Draco mouthed at him. Harry snorted, turned it into a cough, and nodded.

Mr. Malfoy scanned the spotless room with a bored expression on his face. His eyes lingered on Dudley. “This must be your…cousin,” he said to Harry.

Harry nodded. “Yep,” he said, “that’s Dudley.”

Dudley whimpered and tried to squirm back farther into the chair. Aunt Petunia murmured something along the lines of both her and Dudley being very pleased to welcome the Malfoys to their home and poked at Dudley’s shoulder. Mr. Malfoy fluttered a hand dismissively and made no attempt to get someone to introduce him or Draco to Dudley. Draco was turning in slow circles in the middle of the room, gaping at everything with a mixture of delight and disgust.

Uncle Vernon sidled across the room, mustache bristling, his beady little eyes narrowed in a scowl. He walked pointedly over to stand next to Aunt Petunia and took her free hand proprietarily in his. Mr. Malfoy didn’t seem to notice him.

“Got your things all packed, Harry?” he asked.

“They’re upstairs,” said Harry.

“I’ll go help you fetch them,” Draco said eagerly.

A tiny frown appeared between Mr. Malfoy’s eyebrows but he nodded. Harry hurried out of the room, Draco following. Behind him he heard Uncle Vernon say something in his blustery voice and wished he could stay to eavesdrop on what he was sure would be an embarrassing conversation for the Dursleys, but he was eager to leave. Besides, with Draco practically trodding on his heels, he couldn’t have dawdled if he wanted to.

“This is your _house?_ ” Draco asked again, out loud this time. His head kept swiveling around as though he was trying to spot a Snitch. He tripped twice on the stairs but Harry pretended not to notice.

“Yep,” he said, opening the door to his bedroom. Draco followed him inside and stopped dead.

“This is where you _sleep?_ ” he asked.

“Yeah,” said Harry. He pushed Hedwig’s empty cage into Draco’s unresisting arms.

“Where’s the rest of it?” Draco asked, his pointed face crinkling in confusion.

“What rest of what?” Harry asked, distracted, taking one last look around the room to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. He tucked his broomstick under one arm and heaved his trunk upright so he could grab it by one handle.

“All the rest of your…rooms, and things.” Draco waved a hand vaguely.

“This is it,” Harry said. He dragged the trunk out the door into the hallway and Draco followed. Harry thought about asking Draco to grab the other handle to help him carry the heavy trunk, but then decided to just let it thump from one stair to the next. He smirked at the knowledge that Aunt Petunia would be gritting her teeth at the noisy abuse of the staircase; with Mr. Malfoy there he was betting she wouldn’t dare yell at him to stop it.

She didn’t; Harry and Draco walked into the living room to find the scene much the same as they had left it save that Dudley had pulled his knees up in front of him and was trying to pull his head into his shoulders like a turtle, Aunt Petunia’s bottom lip had curled completely up into her mouth making her look like she had just swallowed several lemons, and Uncle Vernon’s face was dangerously purple.

Mr. Malfoy seemed utterly unmoved and was spinning his wand idly in his hands, like a street illusionist might do with a coin. All three Dursleys were staring fixedly at the slim shaft of elm. Mr. Malfoy turned around as Harry and Draco returned and asked, “Ready to go, then?”

“Very ready,” said Harry, and grinned.

Mr. Malfoy caught his wand by the hilt and flicked it at Harry’s trunk, which at once rose up into the air and hovered at his side like a mute, obedient dog. Aunt Petunia screeched, Uncle Vernon yelped, and Dudley thrust himself backwards so hard he knocked the chair over and went tumbling out the other side. His parents dove to his rescue, both getting smacked a few times by his frantically flailing limbs as well as by one another in the scramble.

“Bye then,” Harry choked out through his laughter, and followed the Malfoys out the front door.

Draco was cackling but Mr. Malfoy didn’t laugh, although his thin lips were curled in a smug grin.

“Come along,” he said, “Narcissa’s waiting by the Portkey.” He didn’t explain what that meant but Harry was laughing too hard to care. Mr. Malfoy offered his wand-arm to Harry while taking his son’s free hand with his own. Harry remembered the last time Mr. Malfoy had spirited him away from the Dursleys and wedged his Firebolt securely under one arm. Then he wrapped one hand very tightly around the handle of his trunk and the other around Mr. Malfoy’s elbow. The world suddenly jerked and pulled in on itself and with a loud CRACK, they were gone.

A moment later they were back, but in a different part of the world: a wide, hilly green field. There were patches of trees and off to the right a winding gravel road with a low fence. There were some kind of ruins in the distance but no modern buildings of any kind that Harry could see. He looked around, bewildered. There didn’t seem to be anything that looked like a Quidditch pitch.

Mrs. Malfoy was there, though, and not alone. Like her husband and son she was tall and thin with pale blonde hair and pointed features. She was standing next to two dark-robed wizards, one of whom Harry knew well: Theodore Nott, a skinny boy who shared a dormitory with him and Draco at Hogwarts. Theodore’s sharp nose was buried in a book, which was no surprise. The tall, stooped, elderly wizard making polite conversation with Narcissa Malfoy was almost certainly Theodore’s father, or perhaps his grandfather. They had the same pinched, rabbity features and thin hair, although Theodore’s was brown while the older wizard’s was slate gray.

The adults turned to face Harry, Draco, and Mr. Malfoy when they Apparated into view. Theodore didn’t move until the elderly wizard put a hand on his shoulder and swiveled him around. With an unhappy sigh he tucked his book into a pocket of his robes and gave Harry and Draco a perfunctory wave.

Harry would have waved back but between his trunk and his broom his hands were full. The three of them trotted over to join the others, Harry’s trunk bobbing at his heels him like a blocky dog.

Mr. Malfoy greeted his wife with a peck on the cheek and shook the elderly wizard’s hand. “Afternoon, Nott,” he said cheerfully.

“Malfoy,” the wizard replied, although his eyes flicked to the boys walking next to Lucius.

“Time for introductions, I think?” Mr. Malfoy said, glancing at a fancy pocket watch he drew from his robes. “Hmm, only just,” he murmured to himself. “Those Muggles were more tedious than I expected. Anyway, Josiah, this is Harry Potter. Harry, I don’t believe you’ve met Theodore’s father, Josiah Nott.”

Harry was used to people looking curiously at him when they met him, used to the way their eyes moved at once to the lighting scar on his forehead, but something about the way Mr. Nott stared at him made him feel uncomfortable. Maybe it was the way his smile didn’t quite seem to reach his eyes. Harry grinned nervously and shook Mr. Nott’s hand. His skin was dry and papery, like a snake’s skin, but his grip was surprisingly strong. “Pleasure to meet you, sir,” Harry said.

“Pleasure,” Mr. Nott repeated dully.

“Lucius, the time,” Mrs. Malfoy interrupted, ignoring Harry.

“Yes, of course,” said her husband, ushering them all closer together and stooping to grab the bags on the ground. Harry noticed that Mrs. Malfoy was holding an empty, squashed can of Vimto very gingerly, at arm’s length, as though afraid that it might turn and bite her. Without hesitation the other wizards all crowded around and placed a finger on the flattened can.

Harry stared.

“It’s the Portkey,” Draco explained. “Come on, you’ve got to be touching it before it triggers.”

Feeling dubious, wondering if this was a set-up to some kind of joke at his expense, Harry squeezed in between Draco and Theodore and stretched out a finger to the can.

They all stood there, in a tight circle, as the afternoon sun beat down on their heads. Nobody spoke. It suddenly occurred to Harry how odd this would look if a Muggle were to walk up now…six people, three of them adults, clutching this flattened tin can in the middle of a field, waiting….

Mr. Malfoy still had his watch in his other hand. “Here we go then,” he said, “any second now…”

It happened immediately: Harry felt as though a hook just behind his navel had been suddenly jerked irresistibly forward. His feet left the ground; he could feel Draco and Theodore on either side of him, their shoulders banging into his; they were all speeding forward in a howl of wind and swirling color; his forefinger was stuck to the Vimto can as though it was pulling him magnetically onward and then—

His feet slammed into the ground; Theodore staggered into him and he fell over; the Portkey hit the ground near his head with a heavy thud.

Harry looked up. The Malfoys and Mr. Nott were still standing, although looking very windswept, and Draco looked as though only his father’s hand on his arm was holding him up; Harry and Theodore were both on the ground.

“Twenty-three past three from Walbury Hill,” said a voice.


	4. The Campsite

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This section will draw heavily from Chapter Seven, mostly in fragments and paraphrases with few intact excerpts, running from page seventy-five to page ninety-four of the American hardcover edition.

Harry disentangled himself from Theodore and got to his feet. They had arrived on what appeared to be a deserted stretch of sunny moor. In front of them stood a tired and grumpy-looking witch and wizard; one of whom was holding a large gold watch, the other a thick roll of parchment and a quill. Both were dressed as Muggles, though very inexpertly: The witch with the watch wore a studded denim jacket over a flower-patterned beach cover-up; her colleague, a tweed suit jacket and garish yellow hammer pants.

They both straightened-up when they recognized who had arrived. “Mr. and Mrs. Malfoy, Mr. Nott,” the witch said politely. “Welcome. If I could have you just step over here out of the arrival area, and give Mr. Darzada your spent Portkey, please…”

Mrs. Malfoy handed the squashed can to the wizard in hammer pants. He threw it into a large box filled with other rubbish. Harry guessed that they were all Portkeys that had been used to transport other wizards and witches. He wondered if there was a reason why they had all been made out of trash or if that was just to keep Muggles from being interested in them.

“Thank you ma’am,” the wizard said, giving Narcissa a little half-bow and then a huge yawn. Mrs. Malfoy sniffed. He flushed and bent over his parchment list. “Let’s see, let’s see…ah yes, here we are, your campsites. Malfoy, you’re in the first field that way, right in the middle. The site manager is one Mr. Roberts. Nott, you’re in the second field, and you’ll want to speak to Mr. Payne to get yourselves set up. Er…they’re both Muggles, you know,” he added, sounding nervous.

“Of course they are,” Mr. Nott said, in a sour voice. He and Mrs. Malfoy exchanged a dark look.

“Thank you, Mr. Darzada,” Mr. Malfoy said cheerfully. He beckoned everyone to follow him.

Harry grabbed his floating trunk by a handle and set Hedwig’s empty cage on top of it. He was glad now that she was off looking for Sirius and not with him; she would not have enjoyed traveling by Portkey.

They set off across the deserted moor. The sun was slanting down at an angle right into Harry’s eyes, forcing him to squint. He had to take his glasses off to wipe his watering eyes three times. After about twenty minutes of walking, a small stone cottage next to a gate swam into view. Beyond it, Harry could see the colorful shapes of hundreds and hundreds of tents, rising up the gentle slope of a large field toward a dark wood on the horizon. They said goodbye to the Notts and approached the cottage door.

A man was standing in the doorway, looking out at the tents. Harry knew at a glance that this was the only real Muggle for several acres. When he heard their footsteps, he turned his head to look at them.

None of the Malfoys seemed to want to go near him.

“Morning,” said the Muggle. He sounded dubious and no wonder; it was the middle of the afternoon.

“You would be, ah…Mr. Roberts, then?” asked Mr. Malfoy.

“Aye, I would,” said Mr. Roberts. “And who are you?”

Mrs. Malfoy made an offended noise that reminded Harry unpleasantly of Aunt Petunia when she spotted dirt on her kitchen floor. Mr. Malfoy raised an eyebrow and said coolly, “Malfoy. I believe you will find that we have a reservation.”

“Aye,” said Mr. Roberts, consulting a list tacked to the door. “You’ve got a space in the middle right along the main path. Two nights reserved.”

Draco had been edging forward for a closer look at the Muggle; now his mother put a hand on his shoulder and pulled him back to her side. Harry hid a smirk.

“That sounds accurate,” Mr. Malfoy drawled.

“You’ll be paying now, then?” said Mr. Roberts.

“Oh, certainly,” said Mr. Malfoy. He pulled out a velvet coin purse embroidered with silver peacock feathers. It clinked heavily in his hand as he fished out a few gold coins—Galleons, wizarding money.

“Er—Mr. Malfoy?” Harry whispered.

Mr. Malfoy turned to look at him. “Yes, my boy?”

“Er,” said Harry, feeling his face go hot, “it’s just…ah…do you think he takes gold?” He was uncomfortably aware of Mr. Roberts trying to catch every word and turned sideways as though that might help prevent him listening in.

“Why wouldn’t he?” said Mr. Malfoy. Then he grimaced. “Of course—Muggle money. Blast. I knew I forgot to see to something.”

He and his wife shared a speculative look. Mrs. Malfoy shrugged. “Nothing else for it, I suppose,” she said, but she sounded unhappy. “Although with so many Ministry flunkies running all over the place….”

“No, better not,” Mr. Malfoy agreed. He turned back to Mr. Roberts with a big smile on his face. “Actually I’m afraid we’ve forgotten to stop at the bank to exchange our money,” he explained, his voice dripping with hearty good cheer. “No need to worry though, I’ll get someone to come along and make the exchange for you right here by the end of the day. Now, just at an estimate, how much real—er, how many of these would you guess to be a fair comparison to your Mug—to your coinage?” He held up the Galleons. “Don’t skimp yourself now.”

Mr. Roberts looked perplexed. “That’s gold,” he said. It sounded like a question.

“Yes, of course,” said Mr. Malfoy impatiently. “What, you prefer smaller coin? Silver perhaps?”

“You foreigners?” Mr. Roberts asked. He looked suspicious. “Only nobody uses actual gold as money anymore. What are you lot trying to pull?”

“Trying to pull?” Mr. Malfoy repeated, sounding hurt. “My good Mugg— _man_. I assure you—”

Whatever Mr. Malfoy was going to assure him of, Harry never found out, because just at that moment, a wizard in plus-fours appeared out of thin air next to Mr. Roberts’s front door.

“ _Obliviate!_ ” he said sharply, pointing his wand at Mr. Roberts.

Instantly, Mr. Roberts’s eyes slid out of focus, his brows unknitted, and a look of dreamy unconcern fell over his face. Harry had never seen a Memory Modification Charm in action but he had heard about them—had in fact been responsible for one being performed on his Aunt Marge last summer, although he hadn’t been there to see it—and he recognized the symptoms.

The new wizard rounded on Mr. Malfoy. He looked outraged and exhausted at the same time. “What is this?” he demanded. “Trying to pay a Muggle with Galleons? I ought to write you up for a breach of the Statute!”

Mr. Malfoy raised his chin in the air. “That doesn’t seem like a prudent use of your time to me,” he said, his voice icy.

The wizard in plus-fours swelled up like a balloon, then abruptly deflated. “No,” he growled, “no of course not. Got no time for that sort of paperwork. And you’re hardly the first to flub it up,” he muttered off-handedly.

Both Mr. and Mrs. Malfoy looked deeply insulted but neither of them said anything.

“Fine, fine,” the wizard flapped his hands as if he could make his problems go away just by wishing it, “just take an I.O.U. and have the goblins mail him the appropriate fee afterward. No time to do anything more official about it.” He turned his wand back on the dreamy-eyed Muggle and gave it a little flick. “There. All sorted out. For now. Been having lots of trouble with him,” he confided to the world at large. “Needs a Memory Charm ten times a day to keep him happy. And Ludo Bagman’s not helping. Trotting around talking about Bludgers and Quaffles at the top of his voice, not a worry about anti-Muggle security…. Well, at least I don’t need to worry about _you_ trying to skip-out on the bill, anyway. Blimey, I’ll be glad when this is over. Remember the Statute!” he barked and Disapparated.

Before Harry or any of the Malfoys could speak, Mr. Roberts reached forward. “A map of the campsite for you,” he said placidly to Mr. Malfoy. “Enjoy your stay.”

Draco snatched the map while his father put his gold away. Nobody else bothered to thank Mr. Roberts so Harry told him, “Thank you,” before he followed the Malfoys toward the gate to the campsite. He wasn’t sure if he ought to laugh at Mr. Roberts or feel sorry for him so he put the man out of his mind.

They trudged up the sunny field between long rows of tents. Most looked almost ordinary; their owners had clearly tried to make them as Muggle-like as possible, but had slipped up by adding chimneys, or bellpulls, or weather vanes. However, here and there was a tent so obviously magical that Harry could hardly be surprised that Mr. Roberts was getting suspicious. One had two big braziers with color-changing fire on either side of a solid wooden door; another had window boxes filled with flowers that chimed like bells in the breeze. The wizards and witches they passed were in the same boat as the tents: most had obviously made an effort to dress like Muggles but had failed spectacularly. One old man wore a woman’s lacy nightgown and a traffic cone on his head; another had put trousers on under his kilt. One witch for some reason had wrapped toilet paper all over herself like a mummy and another was wearing perfectly ordinary Muggle jeans and a band t-shirt but had three live canaries perched on her pointy hat.

The Malfoys did not seem to have made any efforts to pass as Muggles at all, Harry realized, looking sideways at the three of them. He wondered why none of the Ministry wizards had objected, but a look around told Harry that they all had bigger problems to worry about. The Malfoys might be wearing robes, but at least they weren’t actually shooting off sparks or riding on broomsticks. Compared to some of the wizards he saw, they were downright unobtrusive.

There were a few empty spots scattered throughout the tents for those who had yet to arrive. They stopped outside a large patch of grass midway across the field with a small sign hammered into the ground that read MALFOI. They stared at it for a moment, Harry wondering if Mr. Malfoy had forgotten they would need a tent like he had with the Muggle money. None of the slim bags they were carrying looked like they held more than a single change of clothes.

“It’s going to be a bit cramped, isn’t it?” Mrs. Malfoy observed dubiously, eyeing the tents on either side.

Mr. Malfoy shrugged. “At least we’ll have tolerable neighbors. I made sure of it.” He grinned and opened up a small green bag. “Stand back, boys,” he warned, and drew his wand. _“Erecto,”_ he said, and out of the bag spilled an impossible amount of cloth and poles which swirled and clattered around in a chaotic, self-contained whirlwind of stripes and silk that resolved themselves, after only a moment, into a fully constructed tent.

At least, it was something _like_ a tent. It looked more like a miniature palace made of striped silk. Mr. Malfoy waved his wand again and a number of peacocks tumbled out of the tent, their long leashes wrapping themselves to hoops along the entrance. The peacocks fluffed their feathers back into place and started strutting around, exploring the area with every appearance of calm contentment, as though they were used to being packed-up inside a magical tent and pulled out again.

Harry’s jaw dropped open.

“There we are,” said Mr. Malfoy. “Home sweet home—or at least, the next best thing for the moment.”

“Come on, Harry,” Draco said, eagerly leading the way inside, “I’ll show you our room.”

“Our _room?_ ” Harry repeated. He followed Draco inside and his jaw dropped again. Instead of walking into a tent—even a sprawling, elaborate, impossible tent—he felt like he had entered an actual palace. The walls seemed to be made of silk rather than wood or stone, but there _were_ walls, and doors, and different rooms. There was even a delicate ironwork staircase leading to a second floor. A small chandelier hung from the middle of the ceiling. The tent, big as it was, had not looked nearly large enough to contain all of this from the outside.

“Come on,” Draco repeated, and Harry followed him up the staircase, his trunk still bobbing obediently at his ankles. His head was spinning. Harry had never been camping in his life; the Dursleys had never taken him on any kind of holiday, preferring to leave him with Mrs. Figg, an old neighbor. However, he was certain that Muggle camping was nothing like this.

“What do you think?” Draco asked, spreading his arms wide. The upper floor of the palatial tent was more of a loft than a proper second floor, a long low-ceilinged sprawling room of silk, with two cushy-looking beds piled high with pillows and feathery-looking comforters. There was a washstand and dressing table with a mirror in one corner and a short bookcase in the other. It looked like more weight than the thin wooden floor ought to be able to hold, especially given that Harry hadn’t seen any proper supports for the floor on his way up the stairs. He hesitated on the top of the steps, unsure about trusting his weight to such a precarious perch.

“It’s not as big as the other rooms,” Draco apologized, “but I like it because you can peek out through the flap and see what’s going on outside. See?” He bounced over to the silk wall, apparently not at all worried about the flimsiness of the floor, and lifted a patch of silk that let unfiltered sunlight stream in. Harry swallowed and stepped forward, wincing as he moved off the solid metal stairs, but the floor underfoot didn’t so much as tremble at his steps. Harry relaxed a little and peeked out through the flap that Draco held open for him.

He could see the rows of tents stretching away across the cluttered field; he seemed to be looking out from beneath the crenellated border of silk between the wall of the tent and its sloping roof. It gave him a weird feeling of vertigo when he thought about space. He didn’t feel like he was any higher up than it looked like the tent reached from the outside, but he knew he had climbed higher than that on the stairs to get here. Harry swallowed hard and backed away from the window. “Neat,” he said weakly.

“I knew you’d like it,” Draco said, and dropped the small bag he had been carrying on one of the beds. “Leave your stuff—let’s go look around!” He bounded back down the stairs. Harry took a deep breath to steady himself, then followed.

“Father! Mother!” Draco called pompously, “Harry and I are going to go look around!”

His parents came bustling out of one of the side rooms, both of them now lacking their traveling cloaks. Mrs. Malfoy had a hairbrush in her hand and a frown on her face as she stared at her son. “What?” she cried unhappily, but Mr. Malfoy chuckled and said, “Oh let them go, Cissy, they’ll be fine. There’s Ministry wizards running all over the place, and plenty of our friends in attendance too. Nothing’s going to hurt them if they do a bit of exploring.” His voice suddenly sharpened. “You both have your wands?” he asked, looking sternly between the two boys.

“Of course,” scoffed Draco, looking as though it was the stupidest question he had ever been asked.

“Er,” said Harry. His was still packed in his trunk from his time at the Dursleys. He felt his face go hot. “I’ll just—run and get mine.” He took the steps two at a time on the way up and jumped the last three on the way back down. By the time he ran back over to the Malfoys, Narcissa had been convinced to let them go.

“Oh very well,” she was saying, “but be _careful_ , Draco. Don’t go too far away. And don’t talk to anyone— _you know_ , unpleasant.” She wrung her hands, hairbrush and all.

“We’ll be fine, mother,” Draco said, rolling his eyes.

“Well all right,” Mrs. Malfoy sniffed. “But I want you back here in an hour—”

“Mother!”

“Fine, an hour and a half. We’ll have dinner together. The—er—the four of us.”

She spoke with a finality that could not be argued. “All right,” Draco said, and darted for the door. He had to endure a hug and a kiss from his mother and a clap on the back from his father before they would let him go. Harry forced a smile and ignored a sudden funny, cold feeling in his stomach, and followed.

Once outside he immediately forgot his discomfort. There were too many strange things and people to look at. One group of wizards sat around a fire that gave off bright purple sparks, passing around a newspaper that had them all very excited and talking in something that sounded a lot like German. All three of them had neat beards and were wearing sequined evening dresses. A tent on the other side of the path kept changing colors from red to green to blue to pink and back again. Two harried-looking wizards stood outside it, trying to convince their very small daughter to land her broomstick and give them back daddy’s wand so they could fix it. A group of middle-aged American witches sat gossiping happily beneath a spangled banner stretched between their tents that read: THE SALEM WITCHES’ INSTITUTE. Further down the row two African witches in bright skirts and headscarves were arguing in cheerful French with a portly white woman wearing a yellow shower cap and a raincoat. When they crossed to another row he and Draco were almost mowed-down by a stray firework tumbling along like a purple tumbleweed. Harry caught snatches of conversation in strange languages from the inside of tents they passed, and though he couldn’t understand a word, the tone of every single voice was excited.

Upfield they stumbled into what Harry realized belatedly must be the Bulgarian section: a large white, green, and red flag was fluttering in the breeze overhead and each and every tent had the same poster attached to it: a poster of a very surly face with heavy black eyebrows. The picture was, of course, moving, but all it did was blink and scowl.“He seems popular,” Harry observed.

Draco laughed. “Of course!” he exclaimed.

“Who is it?” Harry asked, feeling stupid.

“Viktor Krum,” Draco said. “Bulgaria’s Seeker. Haven’t you heard of him?”

Harry gave a helpless shrug. “Not all of us got to spend all summer listening to Quidditch matches on the wireless and reading _Which Broomstick_ and _Quidditch Quarterly_ ,” he pointed-out bitterly.

“Well he’s brilliant,” Draco said, not sounding at all abashed. “One of the best Seekers of all time. He’s the strongest part of Bulgaria’s lineup—as all their fans know,” he added, waving a hand at the posters. “He’s really young, too. Still in school, if you can believe it, but of course Bulgaria knew they didn’t have a chance of winning the World Cup without him so they recruited him straight from Durmstrang.”

“Durmstrang?” Harry repeated. The word sounded familiar.

“The Durmstrang Institute, I mean. It’s another wizarding school,” said Draco.

Harry gaped but didn’t voice the amazement he felt at hearing about the existence of other Wizarding schools. He supposed, now that he saw representatives of so many nationalities in the campsite, that he had been stupid never to realize that Hogwarts couldn’t be the only one.

Fortunately Draco was still talking and didn’t notice the shock on Harry’s face: “Father actually considered sending me to Durmstrang rather than Hogwarts, in fact,” he drawled. “He knows the headmaster, you see. A _much_ better wizard than mental old Dumbledore. They’ve got stricter standards of admittance, too. But mother didn’t like the idea of me going to school so far away. Father says Durmstrang takes a far more sensible line than Hogwarts about the Dark Arts. Durmstrang students actually learn them, not just the defense rubbish we do….”

“That might have come in handy a few times,” Harry said mildly, thinking about Peter Pettigrew.

Draco nodded. “Right? I can’t see the Weasleys being any good at it anyway, so it would definitely give us a leg-up on those brutes. Not to mention all the Mu—the other Gryffindors. They tend to turn their noses up at sensible, practical magic like that. Say they’re too _good_ for it,” he sneered, “but of course the moment they end up between a rock and a hard place they’ll whip-out whatever spell they need to get out of it, the hypocrites.”

He lowered his voice and added in a breathless whisper, “That’s where Gellert Grindewald went to school, you know. Durmstrang. Although they expelled him before he could graduate, so some people say he shouldn’t be counted as a proper alumnus—but _still_.” Draco’s eyes glittered. “Pretty creepy, no? Personally, I wouldn’t want to be in Ireland’s shoes; a lot of things can happen on a Quidditch pitch beyond just Bludgers….”

“Mmm,” said Harry, noncommittally. He was wracking his brain trying to think if he had ever heard the name Gellert Grindewald before. He missed having Crabbe and Goyle around; one of them could usually be counted on to ask at least half the stupid questions Harry wanted to, saving him the embarrassment.

Draco rolled his eyes. “Come on,” he said, “Gellert Grindewald? You know, only the most fearsome Dark Wizard to ever walk the earth until the Dark Lord himself claimed the title?”

“Oh right,” said Harry, “that Gellert Grindewald. Of course.”

Draco snorted and led the way between the Bulgarian tents. By the time they reached the end of the section Harry was starting to get properly unnerved by all the posters of Viktor Krum scowling at him. He was relieved to return to the regular mish-mash of magical tents whose idiosyncrasies varied between well-intentioned mistakes and deliberate, ridiculous violations of the Statute. Harry liked the latter more; since he wasn’t a Muggle who would be frightened or confused by the sight of a tent with a turret or a birdbath, he enjoyed gawking at the elaborate structures that his fellow witches and wizards had erected to show off their magical prowess.

He did feel a little unsettled when everything went green.

They had walked into a patch of tents that were all covered with a thick growth of shamrocks, so that it looked as though small, oddly shaped hillocks had sprouted out of the earth. Grinning faces could be seen under those that had their flaps open. Two of those faces were familiar: Seamus Finnigan, whose thick Irish accent should have made his presence here no surprise to Harry, and Dean Thomas, Finnigan’s best friend. They were both in Gryffindor House at Hogwarts in the same year as Harry and Draco and, as was traditional for students in Slytherin and Gryffindor houses, the four boys did not get on.

Seeing that Finnigan and Thomas hadn’t noticed them yet, Harry pointed at something in the distance and said loudly, “What’s that?” He started walking faster, forcing Draco to run after him. Harry wasn’t scared of the Gryffindors, but Draco’s mother had told them to be careful, and they didn’t have Crabbe and Goyle with them right now. Harry didn’t want to go back to the Malfoys’ tent with a Draco who had a bloody nose or a black eye; he had a feeling that Mrs. Malfoy’s lectures would be even scarier than those of his head of house, Professor Snape.

Harry didn’t slow down until they had left the forest of shamrocks far behind.

“What’s _what?_ ” Draco asked, annoyed.

“I don’t know,” lied Harry, “it left. Sorry.”

Draco rolled his eyes but he didn’t complain; there were so many other fascinating things to see that skipping half of the Irish supporters’ section—which had all seemed to be more of the same, anyway—was no great loss. They easily whiled-away their allotted free time around the campground.

Here and there they saw more familiar faces: other Hogwarts students with their families. Cassius Warrington, who had joined the Slytherin Quidditch team last year, pulled them over to show-off to his parents that he really _did_ know Harry Potter. Next they met the Greengrass sisters outside a neat little tent that would have looked quite normal if not for the flower-wrapped trellis and balcony protruding from one side. Daphne was a fourth year in Slytherin too and she introduced them to her parents with studied diffidence but Astoria, who was starting her second year at Hogwarts, went bright pink and didn’t say a word. Then they were greeted by Blaise Zabini, who pointedly ignored Harry the whole time he talked to Draco, and a little farther on they saw Cho Chang, a very pretty girl who played Seeker on the Ravenclaw team. She waved and smiled at Harry, who tripped over a stray tent stake when he tried to wave back. More to stop Draco from smirking than anything, Harry hurriedly pointed out a small group of teenagers whom he had never seen before.

“Who d’you reckon they are?” he said. Trying to sound like somebody who wasn’t ignorant of most of the magical world he added casually, “Students from Durmstrang maybe?”

Draco looked over at them. “No,” he said, “they’re speaking Japanese, I think. Probably from Mahoutokoro.”

That made Harry feel even stupider. “Right,” he said, and resolved to keep his mouth shut about other wizarding schools from then on.

When the light started to dim they returned to the Malfoys’ tent. There was an elaborate dinner waiting for them there: plates and plates of food, from braised quail with blackberries to hasselback potatoes with gouda to gooey ambrosia salad with mangos and coconut. Harry stared. He had been expecting sausages roasted over a campfire, not a dinner table set with more forks than he knew what to do with and dishes so fancy he didn’t recognize half their names. Mr. Malfoy poured both he and Draco each a small glass of nutmeg sangria and Mrs. Malfoy kept urging her son to eat another helping.

It was almost as good as a meal at Hogwarts; there wasn’t as broad of a selection as they got at school—thankfully, because there were only four of them to eat it all—and having two concerned adults pay attention to what Harry was eating and which fork he was using to eat it with was more scrutiny than Harry was used to, but part of him liked it. It was almost like being part of a family, albeit one that cared a lot more about salad forks than any family Harry had ever heard of.

The strangest part of the meal was who, or rather what, was serving them: the Malfoys had brought along a house-elf. (Harry wondered if it had been packed-up inside the tent like the peacocks, shuddered, and tried not to think about that again.) At first that had made Harry nervous, because the last time he had encountered a house-elf it had not gone well for him. In his second year at Hogwarts, a weird little elf named Dobby had been responsible for one of the most difficult, and most painful, Quidditch matches that Harry had ever flown; he would never forget the strange creature and had had no desire to ever meet any others of his species.

This house-elf was smaller than Dobby and hardly spoke except to say, “yes mistress,” or “no master,” or “right away young master,” as it scurried around clearing plates and replacing dishes. The Malfoys didn’t seem to pay it any attention except when they wanted it to do something. Harry tried to ignore it like they did, but it was hard when he kept seeing it move out of the corner of his eye. It made him feel twitchy and he was glad when the delicious meal was finally over; he had a crick in his neck from turning to watch the elf. It melted away to some other part of the tent as soon as they finished eating, along with all the half-eaten dishes and piles and piles of dirty silverware.

By the time night fell Harry was feeling pleasantly full and sleepy, despite his sore neck, and he followed the Malfoys outside cheerfully. There was a campfire in an elaborate stone pit that had materialized in front of the tent just out of reach of the now-dozing peacocks. Harry lounged in a plush armchair near the fire while the Malfoys told stories about people he didn’t know. He firmly decided that anyone who went camping without magic was a fool. He was almost sorry Dudley wasn’t here, just so he could be jealous of Harry for once.

He barely remembered climbing the ironwork staircase to their loft bedroom and snuggling down into the big, squishy bed. He was asleep almost before he closed his eyes.

 

The next morning started early with the sounds of an explosion. Harry bolted upright in his bed and scrambled for his glasses. He crammed them onto his face just in time to see Mr. Malfoy go sprinting out the door, wand in hand, and wished he hadn’t: Draco’s father was wearing a loose peacock-feather patterned dressing gown and little else. When Mrs. Malfoy followed her husband seconds later, shouting, “Stay there Draco, I’m sure it’s nothing!” over her shoulder, Harry was relieved that she had taken the time to pull on a proper nightgown before grabbing her wand.

They both came back inside almost immediately, Mr. Malfoy’s robe thankfully now securely tied. He was laughing; his wife looked annoyed. “Just one of the Irish supporters setting off a firework,” Mr. Malfoy told them cheerfully.

Immediately Harry and Draco bolted for the window-flap. The campsite was shrouded by a thick mist but above the blurry tents there wheeled a big, bright green shamrock that was giving off sparks. Several people in the distance were shouting. Harry laughed and turned away to get dressed.

Breakfast was not as elaborate as dinner the night before, but it was a lot fancier than Harry was used to eating in the morning. There was a lot less talking than there had been last night too. From the copious amounts of strong, steaming tea that both of Draco’s parents drank, Harry got the impression that neither Mr. nor Mrs. Malfoy were early risers by nature. Mrs. Malfoy kept rubbing her temples and muttering unkind observations about the Irish under her breath; Mr. Malfoy looked more cheerful but he yawned every two minutes.

As the day brightened and the mist wore off, other witches and wizards—friends of the Malfoys—stopped in to say hello. Almost all of them were eager to be introduced to Harry, who shook a lot of hands and smiled at a lot of unfamiliar names he knew he wouldn’t remember later. Everybody stared at his scar. At first it was flattering to have so many powerful, wealthy, attractive, or influential people staring at him—everyone the Malfoys knew seemed to fall into one or all of those categories—but after a while it started to irritate Harry. He felt like an animal on display at a zoo. He was clearly the _prize_ animal of the zoo, but it still made him think of that boa constrictor he had freed one day before he’d known how magic worked. He thought he understood the snake’s feelings better now than he had then: being admired was nice, but eventually freedom and privacy sounded like more fun than getting fawned over.

“Want to go for another walk around the campsite?” he asked Draco as they finished their very nice lunch.

Draco thought a moment—Harry had a feeling that he was struggling between enjoying the reflected admiration of people staring at Harry, and resenting the fact that they were admiring his friend and not _him_ —then shrugged. “Yeah, all right,” he said. “They don’t have a World Cup every day, do they?”

To Harry’s surprise it was Draco’s father who protested this time, not his mother. “Oh, are you sure?” Mr. Malfoy said, looking disappointed. “Cornelius was going to try and stop by this afternoon if he can get a moment away from all the bustle and I know he was looking forward to seeing you again, Harry….”

Harry was torn; he very much wanted to talk to the Minister of Magic about Sirius, but on the other hand, now probably wasn’t a good time. Harry stared out at the riot of colorful witches and wizards passing in front of the Malfoys’ tent and thought it over. He watched a group of haggard-looking Ministry wizards rush past, pointing at the distant evidence of some sort of a magical fire that was sending violet sparks twenty feet into the air and that made up his mind for him: Even if Fudge did find the time to drop in for a visit. he would be in no mood to argue with Harry again about whether or not his god-father was an innocent man.

“Yeah,” Harry said, “a walk sounds fun.”

“Oh let them go, Lucius,” Mrs. Malfoy said tartly, to Harry’s surprise. “What do they care about stodgy old ministers? They’re children, they should be enjoying the festivities. Just come back in plenty of time for dinner, all right dear?” she said, patting Draco’s cheek. “We’ll want to eat early so we can be ready for the match.”

“Of course mother,” said Draco, hopping to his feet.

Harry lost no time following Draco out into the campsite; he didn’t want to risk her changing her mind.

The campsite was filling up. There hadn’t been many empty spaces left when Harry and the Malfoys arrived yesterday afternoon, but now Harry could hardly spot any open ground. There seemed to be fewer tents that would pass inspection by a Muggle, or maybe Harry was just paying more attention to the magical embellishments now. They saw one that was even bigger than the Malfoys’ and seemed to be made of actual stone although it fluttered in the breeze like canvas. A little farther on they passed a tent that had three floors and several turrets; and a short way beyond that was a tent that had a front garden attached, complete with a birdbath, sundial, and fountain.

The use of magic was becoming more overt and prolific, too. Harry spotted several children on broomsticks, most of them toys that rose only high enough for their riders’ toes to skim the grass. Ministry wizards ran around frantically, trying to get everyone to come back down to earth and put their wands away. There were so many strange and wonderful people and things to look at that nobody noticed Harry’s scar or paid him and Draco any attention whatsoever.

A sense of excitement rose like a palpable cloud over the campsite as the afternoon wore on. Harry was more than happy to return to the Malfoys’ tent for another excellent dinner; all the walking around and staring at things had made him hungry, as had the delicious smells wafting from everyone’s tents. By dusk, the still summer air itself seemed to be quivering with anticipation, and as darkness spread like a curtain over the thousands of waiting wizards, the last vestiges of pretense disappeared: The Ministry seemed to have bowed to the inevitable and stopped fighting the signs of blatant magic now breaking out everywhere.

Salesmen were Apparating every few feet, carrying trays and pushing carts full of extraordinary merchandise. There were luminous rosettes—green for Ireland, red for Bulgaria—which were squealing the names of the players, pointed green hats bedecked with dancing shamrocks, Bulgarian scarves adorned with lions that really roared, flags from both countries that played their national anthems as they were waved; there were tiny models of Firebolts that really flew, and collectible figures of famous players, which strolled across the palm of your hand, preening themselves.

Harry and the Malfoys strolled through the rows of salesmen, buying souvenirs. Harry was surprised to see Draco’s dignified mother buy a silly hat with dancing shamrocks until she playfully stuck it on her husband’s head instead. They all laughed, but Mr. Malfoy didn’t take the hat off. All three of them had changed into bright green robes after dinner to show their support of Ireland. Harry didn’t have anything but his new Muggle clothes to wear, but he bought a large green rosette, which he pinned to his shirt.

“Wow, look at these!” said Harry, hurrying over to a cart piled high with what looked like brass binoculars, except that they were covered with all sorts of weird knobs and dials.

“Omnioculars,” said the saleswizard eagerly. “You can replay action…slow everything down…and they flash up a play-by-play breakdown if you need it. Bargain—ten Galleons each.”

Mr. Malfoy bought a set for each of them as well as fancy souvenir programs. Harry was tempted to get one of the miniature players but he didn’t want to have to carry it around for the whole match and he thought it might be weird to stuff a tiny, walking person into the pocket of his jeans. Before he could make up his mind whether to get one or not a deep, booming gong sounded somewhere beyond the woods, and at once, green and red lanterns blazed into life in the trees, lighting a path to the field.

“No need to rush,” Mrs. Malfoy said, when Draco would have run off at once. “They won’t give our seats away, so you might as well let the riff-raff finish pushing and shoving before we go wade through it all.”

Harry felt like he would have gladly pushed and shoved his way through a hundred people to get to the Quidditch match but he obediently dropped back to walk with the Malfoys at the tail end of the crowd.


	5. The Quidditch World Cup

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This section will consist of heavy excerpts from Chapter Eight stretching from pages ninety-five to one-hundred-and-sixteen in the American hardcover edition. Rather than glossing-over and truncating the entirety of the match — the result of which is, of course, unchanged — I have left most of the text as-is in order to highlight the small differences between canon and this version of the World Cup, although I have abbreviated parts here and there.
> 
> There is nothing distinct plotwise in this chapter that happens differently from in canon; Ireland still wins and Krum still catches the Snitch. If you thus feel like skipping over this chapter in your reading you will not be missing anything crucial to the story itself and if you find re-reading canon text section tedious I suggest that you do just that. When we pick up with “The Dark Mark” next chapter there will be more distinct differences so if you prefer to jump straight to that, please don’t feel obligated to drudge through this chapter solely on my account!

Walking sedately, Harry and the Malfoys entered the wood near the tail end of the crowd, everyone following the lantern-lit trail. They could hear the sounds of thousands of people moving around them, shouts and laughter, snatches of singing. The atmosphere of feverish excitement was highly infectious; Harry couldn’t stop grinning. They walked through the wood for twenty minutes, talking and joking loudly, until at last they emerged on the other side and found themselves in the shadow of a gigantic stadium. Though Harry could see only a fraction of the immense gold walls surrounding the field, he could tell that ten cathedrals would fit comfortably inside it.

“Room for a hundred thousand,” said Mr. Malfoy, spotting the awestruck look on Harry’s face. “The Ministry has had people working on it for a year. Quite an intense little project. It’s got even stronger Muggle Repelling Charms than we do on the manor.”

“Muggle Repelling Charms?” Harry repeated, curious.

“Oh, they’ll make a Muggle turn around before they get too close. Sudden memory of urgent appointments, things left undone at home, rumors of bad weather; things like that. Muggles are particularly susceptible to magical mental influences, you know.” He grinned toothily.

“Oh,” said Harry, who hadn’t known any such thing. He wondered if he could buy a Muggle Repelling Charm for the Dursleys.

Mr. Malfoy led them toward the nearest entrance, which was still surrounded by a swarm of shouting witches and wizards despite their languid pace.

“Prime seats!” said the Ministry witch at the entrance when she checked their tickets. “Top Box! Not that one would expect anything less, of course. Well, straight upstairs, Mr. Malfoy, all the way up as high as it goes.”

The stairs into the stadium were carpeted in rich purple. They clambered upward with the rest of the crowd, which slowly filtered away through the doors into the stands to their left and right. Mr. Malfoy’s party kept climbing, and at last they reached the top of the staircase and found themselves in a small box, set at the highest point of the stadium and situated exactly halfway between the golden goalposts. About twenty purple-and-gilt chairs stood in two rows here, most already filled with excited spectators, and Harry, filing into the second row of seats with the Malfoys, looked down upon a scene the likes of which he could never have imagined.

A hundred thousand witches and wizards were taking their places in the seats, which rose in levels around the long oval field. Everything was suffused with a mysterious golden light, which seemed to come from the stadium itself. The field looked smooth as velvet from their lofty position. At either end of the field stood three goal hoops, fifty feet high; right opposite them, almost at Harry’s eye level, was a gigantic blackboard. Gold writing kept dashing across it as though an invisible giant’s hand were scrawling upon the blackboard and then wiping it off again; watching it, Harry saw that it was flashing advertisements across the field.

_The Bluebottle: A Broom for All the Family – Safe, Reliable, and with Built-in Anti-Burglar Buzzer…Mrs. Skower’s All-Purpose Magical Mess Remover: No Pain, No Stain!...Gladrags Wizardwear—London, Paris, Hogsmeade…_

“There you are, Lucius!” somebody cried in a happy voice, and Harry tore his eyes away from the sign and looked around to see who else was sharing the box with them. Cornelius Fudge, the Minister of Magic, was walking toward them all with a big grin on his face.

“Ah, Fudge,” said Mr. Malfoy, holding out his hand as he reached the Minister of Magic. “How are you? I don’t think you’ve met my wife, Narcissa? Or our son, Draco?”

“How do you do, how do you do?” said Fudge, smiling and bowing to Mrs. Malfoy.

“Harry Potter of course you know,” Mr. Malfoy continued, waving casually at Harry.

“Harry, of course.” Fudge smiled, frowned as though remembering something unpleasant, and then smiled again. “How are you, dear boy? So good to see you again, so good to see you.” He pumped Harry’s hand several times and then introduced them all to the wizards on either side of him. “And allow me to introduce you to Mr. Oblansk—Obalonsk—Mr.—well, he’s the Bulgarian Minister of Magic, and he can’t understand a word I’m saying anyway, so never mind.” He turned back to the Bulgarian minister, who was wearing splendid robes of black velvet trimmed with gold, and said loudly, “Harry Potter, you know. _Harry Potter_ …oh come on now, you know who he is…the boy who survived You-Know-Who…you _do_ know who he is—”

The Bulgarian wizard suddenly spotted Harry’s scar and started gabbling loudly and excitedly, pointing at it.

“Knew we’d get there in the end,” said Fudge wearily to Harry. “I’m no great shakes at languages; I need Barty Crouch for this sort of thing. Ah, I see his house-elf’s saving him a seat….Good job, too, these Bulgarian blighters have been trying to cadge all the best places…and let’s see, who else—you know Arthur Weasley, I daresay?”

It was a tense moment. Mr. Weasley had brought what looked like an entire Quidditch team himself, all redheads like him save for one girl with bushy brown hair, and Harry and his friends had never gotten along with the Weasley family. He had gotten the idea from Draco that his parents didn’t much care for them either. Of course, that was complicated by the fact that Harry and Draco had once saved the youngest Weasley’s, Ginny’s, life—and just last year her older brother, Ron, had been the owner of the rat that had turned out to be Peter Pettigrew in disguise. Harry wasn’t quite sure where he stood with most of the Weasleys these days.

Mr. Malfoy didn’t seem to be in any doubt of his own feelings; his cold gray eyes swept over Mr. Weasley, and then up and down the row.

“Good lord, Arthur,” Mr. Malfoy said softly. “What did you have to sell to get seats in the Top Box? Surely your house wouldn’t have fetched this much?”

Fudge, who wasn’t listening, said, “Lucius has just given a _very_ generous contribution to St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries, Arthur. He’s here as my guest.”

“How—how nice,” said Mr. Weasley, with a very strained smile. He gave Harry—and Draco, smirking beside him—a much more heartfelt expression. “It’s lovely to see you again, boys. Just lovely. Hope you’re—er—both keeping well, yes?”

Harry returned the smile with an awkward one of his own. He knew that Mr. and Mrs. Weasley were deeply grateful for their daughter’s life, but it made him uncomfortable to talk about. “Right, yes,” he said, “thanks. You?”

They were all saved from any more uncomfortable conversation when the brown-haired girl sitting next to Ron Weasley leaned back and squealed, “Harry! I didn’t know you were going to be here! How exciting! Ron and his family invited me to come along with them, well obviously, that’s how I’m here. It was very kind of them!” She gave Harry a big, buck-toothed smile. The green rosette in her hair looked on the verge of strangulation.

Next to her Ron Weasley, a tall, gangling boy with a long nose and lots of freckles, turned red. He muttered something that Harry couldn’t make out but he distinctly heard the words “Scabbers,” and “Crookshanks,” and “only fair,” and figured he knew why Ron had chosen to be generous and invite their only mutual friend to the World Cup.

“Hi,” said Harry. Draco didn’t say anything but his face curled in something that _could_ have been a smile. Hermione beamed; Ron nodded curtly. Ginny Weasley, her freckled face pink, gave both Harry and Draco a little wave as they took their seats behind the Weasleys. The adults were still talking but Harry wasn’t really listening; he was distracted by the sight of the creature sitting in the chair next to his: a house-elf. Its legs were so short that they stuck out in front of it on the chair. It was wearing a tea towel draped like a toga and it had its face hidden in its hands. Long, batlike ears stuck up on either side of its head. Harry had gotten the impression that house-elves were generally servants and he wondered what one was doing here, especially given how unhappy it looked.

 “Is that a house-elf?” Draco was leaning around Harry for a better look. “What’s one of those doing here?” he asked, echoing Harry’s thoughts.

The tiny creature looked up and stretched its fingers, revealing enormous brown eyes and a nose the exact size and shape of a large tomato. “Winky is—is saving a seat for her master, sir,” the elf said, tilting her head toward the empty seat beside her. Her voice was higher even than Dobby’s had been, a teeny, quivering squeak of a voice.

“What are you hiding your face for?” Harry asked, curious.

“I is not liking heights, sir,” the house-elf—whose name, Harry supposed, was Winky—said. She glanced toward the edge of the box and gulped.

“Why’s your master sent you up here, if he knows you don’t like heights?” said Harry, frowning.

“Master—master is very busy,” said Winky. “But Winky is a good house-elf. Winky does what she is told.”

She gave the edge of the box another frightened look and hid her eyes completely again. Harry turned back to Draco.

“That doesn’t seem very nice,” Harry said.

Draco shrugged, no longer interested in the house-elf now that he had an explanation for her presence. “House-elves don’t care, they love following orders. Even nasty ones. It’s what they’re born to do.” He pulled out his program and started leafing through the glossy pages.

Harry frowned. It occurred to him to wonder whether Dobby had been following anyone’s orders when he had attacked Harry. He couldn’t picture anyone he knew sending a house-elf after him; no one in Slytherin would have risked their team’s chances at Quidditch just for a grudge against Harry and getting someone else to do their dirty work didn’t seem like the sort of thing that Ron’s older brothers, Fred and George, two of Harry’s regular tormentors at school, would do. He wondered if Winky knew Dobby and if she could tell him who Dobby’s master was, and was just opening his mouth to ask when another wizard came charging into the box.

He was wearing long Quidditch robes in thick horizontal stripes of bright yellow and black. An enormous picture of a wasp was splashed across his chest. He had the look of a powerfully built man gone slightly to seed; the robes were stretched tightly across a large belly he surely had not had when they had first been sewn. His nose was squashed (probably broken by a stray Bludger, Harry thought), but his round blue eyes, short blond hair, and rosy complexion made him look like a very overgrown schoolboy.

“Ludo Bagman,” Draco whispered to Harry. “He used to fly for England, you know.”

“Everyone ready?” Ludo said, his round face gleaming like a great, excited Edam. “Minister—ready to go?”

 “Ready when you are, Ludo,” said Fudge comfortably.

Ludo whipped out his wand, directed it at his own throat, and said “ _Sonorus!”_ and then spoke over the roar of the sound that was now filling the packed stadium; his voice echoed over them, booming into every corner of the stands.

“Ladies and gentlemen…welcome! Welcome to the final of the four hundred and twenty-second Quidditch World Cup!”

The spectators screamed and clapped. Thousands of flags waved, adding their discordant national anthems to the racket. The huge blackboard opposite them was wiped clear of its last message ( _Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans – A Risk with Every Mouthful!_ ) and now showed BULGARIA: 0, IRELAND: 0.

“And now, without further ado, allow me to introduce…the Bulgarian National Team Mascots!”

The right-hand side of the stands, which was a solid block of scarlet, roared its approval.

“What do you think they’ve brought this time, Cissy?” Mr. Malfoy asked his wife, speaking just loudly enough that Harry could hear him over the cheering. “You think they’re going with their usual or—aaah!” He grinned and leaned forward eagerly in his seat as Mrs. Malfoy started to snicker.

_“Veela_ ,” she said, smirking, “oh gracious. Draco darling, better cover your ears.” She reached across her husband toward her son but Draco leaned away.

“Mother, don’t be ridiculous,” he protested, fending off her hands with an annoyed scowl.

“Oh nonsense,” Mr. Malfoy said heartily, “let the boy have some fun. It won’t do him any harm.”

“He’s awfully young, Lucius, I just don’t want him doing anything _foolish_.”

 “What are veel—?”

But a hundred veela were now gliding out onto the field, and Harry’s question was answered for him. Veela were women…the most beautiful women Harry had ever seen…except that they weren’t—they couldn’t be—human. This puzzled Harry for a moment while he tried to guess what exactly they could be; what could make their skin shine moon-bright like that, or their white-gold hair fan out behind them without wind…but then the music started, and Harry stopped worrying about them not being human—in fact, he stopped worrying about anything at all.

The veela had started to dance, and Harry’s mind had gone completely and blissfully blank. All that mattered in the world was that he kept watching the veela, because if they stopped dancing, terrible things would happen….

And as the veela danced faster and faster, wild, half-formed thoughts started chasing through Harry’s dazed mind. He wanted to do something impressive, right now. Jumping from the box into the stadium seemed a good idea…but would it be good enough?

“What are you doing, Harry?” said Ginny Weasley’s voice from a long way off.

The music stopped. Harry blinked. He was standing up, trying to climb over the chair in front of him—Ginny Weasley’s chair. She was half turned around, trying to push his knee off the back of her seat. In the chair beside her, her brother Ron was frozen in an attitude that looked as though he were about to dive from a springboard. Next to Harry, Draco was rubbing his eyes with one hand and pointing at Harry with the other while he laughed. Harry didn’t know why Draco was laughing; he didn’t think there was anything funny going on.

Angry yells were filling the stadium. The crowd didn’t want the veela to go. Harry was with them; he would, of course, be supporting Bulgaria, and he wondered vaguely why he had a large green shamrock pinned to his chest. In the seat in front of him, Ron Weasley was absentmindedly shredding the shamrocks on his hat. Mr. Weasley leaned over to his son and tugged the hat out of his hands.

“You’ll be wanting that,” he said, “once Ireland have had their say.”

“Huh?” said Ron, sounding confused. Harry was still perched on the back of Ginny’s chair, staring openmouthed at the veela, who had now lined up along one side of the field.

Hermione made a loud tutting noise and folded her arms, turning pointedly away from Ron. “ _Honestly!”_ she said.

Draco, still chuckling, reached up and pulled Harry back into his seat. “Brilliant,” he murmured, his pale eyes looking slightly glazed.

“And now,” roared Ludo Bagman’s voice, “kindly put your wands into the air…for the Irish National Team’s Mascots!”

Next moment, what seemed to be a great green-and-gold comet came zooming into the stadium. It did one circuit of the stadium, then split into two smaller comets, each hurtling toward the goalposts. A rainbow arced suddenly across the field, connecting the two balls of light. The crowd oooohed and aaaaahed, as though at a fireworks display. Now the rainbow faded and the balls of light reunited and merged; they had formed a great shimmering shamrock, which rose up into the sky and began to soar over the stands. Something like golden rain seemed to be falling from it—

“Excellent!” yelled Ron as the shamrock soared over them, and heavy gold coins rained from it, bouncing off their heads and seats. Squinting up at the shamrock, Harry realized that it was actually comprised of thousands of tiny little bearded men with red vests, each carrying a minute lamp of gold or green.

“Leprechauns!” said Mr. Malfoy quite unnecessarily over the tumultuous applause of the crowd, many of whom were still fighting and rummaging around under their chairs to retrieve the gold.

In the row in front of Harry, Ron was stuffing fistfuls of gold coins into his pockets while his sister tried to step on his hands whenever he reached under her chair. Draco snickered nastily and said something to his mother that Harry couldn’t hear over the cheering.

The great shamrock dissolved, the leprechauns drifted down onto the field on the opposite side from the veela, and settled themselves cross-legged to watch the match.

“And now, ladies and gentlemen, kindly welcome—the Bulgarian National Quidditch Team! I give you—Dimitrov!”

A scarlet-glad figure on a broomstick, moving so fast it was blurred, shot out onto the field from an entrance far below, to wild applause from the Bulgarian supporters.

“Ivanova!”

A second scarlet-robed player zoomed out.

“Zograf! Levski! Vulchanov! Volkov! Aaaaaaand— _Krum!_ ”

“That’s him, that’s him!” yelled Ron, pointing wildly. Harry focused his Omnioculars on the distant red blur. “We all heard Bagman,” Draco grumbled, “we know who it is, you idiot, shut-up,” but Harry was too busy studying the Bulgarian Seeker to listen.

Viktor Krum was thin, dark, and sallow-skinned, with a large curved nose and thick black eyebrows. He looked like an overgrown bird of prey. It was hard to believe he was only eighteen.

“And now, please greet—the Irish National Quidditch Team!” yelled Bagman. “Presenting—Connolly! Ryan! Troy! Mullet! Moran! Quigley! Aaaaaand— _Lynch!_ ”

Seven green blurs swept onto the field; Harry spun a small dial on the side of his Omnioculars and slowed the players down enough to read the word “Firebolt” on each of their brooms and see their names, embroidered in silver, upon their backs.

“And here, all the way from Egypt, our referee, acclaimed Chairwizard of the International Association of Quidditch, Hassan Mostafa!”

A small and skinny wizard, completely bald but with a mustache to rival Uncle Vernon’s, wearing robes of pure gold to match the stadium, strode out onto the field. A silver whistle was protruding from under the mustache, and he was carrying a large wooden crate under one arm, his broomstick under the other. Harry spun the speed dial on his Omnioculars back to normal, watching closely as Mostafa mounted his broomstick and kicked the crate open—four balls burst into the air: the scarlet Quaffle, the two black Bludgers, and (Harry saw it for the briefest moment, before it sped out of sight) the minuscule, winged Golden Snitch. With a sharp blast on his whistle, Mostafa shot into the air after the balls.

“Theeeeeeeey’re OFF!” screamed Bagman. “And it’s Mullet! Troy! Moran! Dimitrov! Back to Mullet! Troy! Levski! Moran!”

It was Quidditch as Harry had never seen it played before. He was pressing his Omnioculars so hard to his glasses that they were cutting into the bridge of his nose. The speed of the players was incredible—the Chasers were throwing the Quaffle to one another so fast that Bagman only had time to say their names. Harry spun the slow dial on the right of his Omnioculars again, pressed the play-by-play button on the top, and he was immediately watching in slow motion, while glittering purple lettering flashed across the lenses and the noise of the crowd pounded against his eardrums.

Harry was so busy studying the play-by-plays on his Omnioculars that he missed seeing the first point of the match—scored by Troy of Ireland—and if he hadn’t been so caught-up in the excitement of the World Cup he probably would have tried to crawl under his chair in embarrassment.

Instead he kept watching, with his Omnioculars now dialed to normal speed. Within ten minutes Ireland had scored twice more, bringing their lead to thirty-zero and coaxing a thunderous tide of roars and applause from the green-clad supporters.

Harry plugged his ears and screwed up his eyes when Bulgaria scored their first goal and the veela started dancing again; he wanted to keep his mind on the game. After a few seconds, Draco elbowed him and pointed imperiously at the field. “You’re missing it!” he shouted into Harry’s ear, pulling his hand away. Harry chanced a glance at the pitch. The veela had stopped dancing, and Bulgaria was once again in possession of the Quaffle.

“Dimitrov! Levski! Dimitrov! Ivanova—oh I say!” roared Bagman.

One hundred thousand wizards gasped as the two Seekers, Krum and Lynch, plummeted through the center of the Chasers, so fast that it looked as though they had just jumped from airplanes without parachutes. Harry followed their descent through his Omnioculars, squinting to see where the Snitch was—

“They’re going to crash!” screamed Hermione from her seat in front of Harry.

She was half right—at the very last second, Viktor Krum pulled out of the dive and spiraled off. Lynch, however, hit the ground with a dull thud that could be heard throughout the stadium. A huge groan rose from the Irish seats.

“Idiot!” snarled Draco. “He was obviously faking!”

“It’s time-out!” yelled Bagman’s voice, “as trained mediwizards hurry onto the field to examine Aidan Lynch!”

“He’ll be okay, he only ploughed!” a burly Weasley whom Harry didn’t recognize said reassuringly to Ginny, who was hanging over the side of the box, looking horror-struck. “Which is what Krum was after, of course….”

Harry hastily pressed the replay and play-by-play buttons on his Omnioculars, twiddled the speed dial, and put them back up to his eyes.

He watched as Krum and Lynch dived again in slow motion. _Wronski Defensive Feint—dangerous Seeker diversion_ read the shining purple letters across his lenses. He saw Krum’s face contorted with concentration as he pulled out of the dive just in time, while Lynch was flattened, and he understood—Krum hadn’t seen the Snitch at all, he was just making Lynch copy him. Harry had pulled similar tricks himself, but never like that; Krum hardly looked as though he was using a broomstick at all; he moved so easily through the air that he looked unsupported and weightless. Harry turned his Omnioculars back to normal and focused them on Krum. He was now circling high above Lynch, who was being revived by mediwizards with cups of potion. Harry, focusing still more closely upon Krum’s face, saw his dark eyes darting all over the ground a hundred feet below. He was using the time while Lynch was revived to look for the Snitch without interference.

Harry resolved to fly more like that. If he could become even half the Seeker that Krum was, he would never again have to worry about having his spot on their team given to Draco, no matter what happened.

After fifteen more fast and furious minutes, Ireland had pulled ahead by ten more goals. They were now leading by one hundred and thirty points to ten, and the game was starting to get dirtier.

Fouls and penalties built up—cobbing, skinning; even the referee was not immune, falling under the sway of the veela for a few minutes that had almost ended with the Bulgarian mascots being sent off the field.

Play now reached a level of ferocity beyond anything they had yet seen. The Beaters on both sides were acting without mercy: Volkov and Vulchanov in particular seemed not to care whether their clubs made contact with Bludger or human as they swung them violently through the air. Dimitrov shot straight at Moran, who had the Quaffle, nearly knocking her off her broom.

“ _Foul!”_ roared the Irish supporters as one, all standing up in a great wave of green.

“Foul!” echoed Ludo Bagman’s magically magnified voice. “Dimitrov skins Moran—deliberately flying to collide there—and it’s got to be another penalty—yes, there’s the whistle!”

The leprechauns had risen into the air again, and this time, they formed a giant hand, which was making a very rude sign indeed at the veela across the field. At this, the veela lost control. Instead of dancing, they launched themselves across the field and began throwing what seemed to be handfuls of fire at the leprechauns. Watching through his Omnioculars, Harry saw that they didn’t look remotely beautiful now. On the contrary, their faces were elongating into sharp, cruel-beaked bird heads, and long, scaly wings were bursting from their shoulders—

“And _that_ , boys,” yelled Mr. Weasley over the tumult of the crowd below, “is why you should never go for looks alone!”

Someone nearby let out a sharp “HA!” that was even louder than Mr. Weasley’s shouted advice. Harry turned to look but he wasn’t sure which one of Draco’s parents had laughed; they were both smirking at each other as though Mr. Weasley had said something very stupid. “As if dangerous and beautiful were a _bad_ combination,” Mr. Malfoy chortled, but Harry was already looking at the pitch again.

Ministry wizards were flooding onto the field to separate the veela and the leprechauns, but with little success; meanwhile, the pitched battle below was nothing to the one taking place above. Harry turned this way and that, staring through his Omnioculars, as the Quaffle changed hands with the speed of a bullet.

The chaos on the ground wasn’t letting up either. The next time Ireland scored, the cheers of the Irish supporters could barely be heard over the shrieks of the veela, the blasts now issuing from the Ministry members’ wands, and the furious roars of the Bulgarians. The game recommenced immediately; now Levski had the Quaffle, now Dimitrov—

The Irish Beater Quigley swung heavily at a passing Bludger, and hit it as hard as possible toward Krum, who did not duck quickly enough. It hit him full in the face.

There was a deafening groan from the crowd; Krum’s nose looked broken, there was blood everywhere, but Hassan Mostafa didn’t blow his whistle. He had become distracted, and Harry couldn’t blame him; one of the veela had thrown a handful of fire and set his broom tail alight.

Harry wanted someone to realize that Krum was injured; even though he was supporting Ireland, Krum was the most exciting player on the field. Draco obviously felt the same.

“That’ll be pretty much the only chance Lynch has of getting the Snitch,” he chortled. “Hope he can take advantage of it before somebody calls a time-out and—”

_“Look at Lynch!”_ Harry yelled.

For the Irish Seeker had suddenly gone into a dive, and Harry was quite sure that this was no Wronski Feint; this was the real thing….

“He’s seen the Snitch!” Harry shouted. “He’s seen it! Look at him go!”

Half the crowd seemed to have realized what was happening; the Irish supporters rose in another great wave of green, screaming their Seeker on…but Krum was on his tail. How he could see where he was going, Harry had no idea; there were flecks of blood flying through the air behind him, but he was drawing level with Lynch now as the pair of them hurtled toward the ground again—

“They’re going to crash!” shrieked Hermione.

“Shut-up!” roared Draco.

“Lynch is!” yelled Harry.

And he was right—for the second time, Lynch hit the ground with tremendous force and was immediately stampeded by a horde of angry veela.

“The Snitch, where’s the Snitch?” bellowed one of the Weasleys from down the row.

“He’s got it—Krum’s got it—it’s all over!” shouted Harry.

Krum, his red robes shining with blood from his nose, was rising gently into the air, his fist held high, a glint of gold in his hand.

The scoreboard was flashing BULGARIA: 160, IRELAND: 170 across the crowd, who didn’t seem to have realized what had happened. Then, slowly, as though a great jumbo jet were revving up, the rumbling from the Ireland supporters grew louder and louder and erupted into screams of delight.

“IRELAND WINS!” Bagman shouted, who like the Irish, seemed to be taken aback by the sudden end of the match. “KRUM GETS THE SNITCH—BUT IRELAND WINS—good lord, I don’t think any of us were expecting that!”

Harry was on his feet already; he must have stood to watch Krum’s catch although he couldn’t remember doing so. Beside him the Malfoys were all cheering too, Lucius waving his shamrock hat in the air and Narcissa using his other arm as a sort of springboard so she could jump higher. Draco seemed torn between cheering for Krum and Ireland and chortling at Lynch’s misfortune; Harry was afraid he was going to choke if he didn’t make up his mind whether to laugh or yell.

In the row in front of Harry the Weasleys were all on their feet as well. “What did he catch the Snitch for?” Ron bellowed, even as he jumped up and down, applauding with his hands over his head. “He ended it when Ireland were a hundred and sixty points ahead, the idiot!”

“He knew they were never going to catch up!” Harry shouted back over all the noise, also applauding loudly. He had forgotten that he didn’t like Ron Weasley; all he could think about was the game he had just witnessed. “The Irish Chasers were too good….He wanted to end it on his terms, that’s all….”

“He was very brave, wasn’t he?” Hermione said, leaning forward to watch Krum land as a swarm of mediwizards blasted a path through the battling leprechauns and veela to get to him. “He looks a terrible mess….”

Harry put his Omnioculars to his eyes again. It was hard to see what was happening below, because leprechauns were zooming delightedly all over the field, but he could just make out Krum, surrounded by mediwizards. He looked surlier than ever and refused to let them mop him up. His team members were around him, shaking their heads and looking dejected; a short way away, the Irish players were dancing gleefully in a shower of gold descending from their mascots. Flags were waving all over the stadium, the Irish national anthem blasted from all sides; the veela were shrinking back into their usual, beautiful selves now, though looking dispirited and forlorn.

Harry continued to clap as the Bulgarian and Irish players filed into the top box to shake hands with both Ministers of Magic and to receive the accolades of the crowd. When Krum’s name was announced, the whole stadium gave him a resounding, earsplitting roar. By the time Troy and Quigley lifted the Cup into the air and the crowd below thundered its approval, Harry’s hands were numb with clapping.

They all filed out of the top box in a wild, chattering mass of excitement. Mrs. Malfoy didn’t say anything about letting the riff-raff go first this time; she was too caught-up in the same wave of excitement that had gripped everyone else. Harry tried to get Hermione’s attention to ask her a question but she and Ron were arguing loudly about one of the fouls Bulgaria had committed and she didn’t hear him. Harry didn’t mind; he felt too good about life just then to be annoyed by anything, even Ron Weasley. When little Ginny gave him a big hug on the way out the door he was too happy to feel embarrassed and Draco was too busy critiquing Lynch’s performance to tease him about it, so that was all right too.


	6. The Dark Mark

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This section contains several excerpts from Chapter Nine ranging from pages 117 to 144 of the American hardcover edition. Even the lengthy section featuring the confrontation with the Ministry has been altered, so I do not suggest skipping over anything in this update.

“It’s too bad we don’t have commentary of that quality at Hogwarts, isn’t it?” Draco smirked at Harry as they all made their way slowly down the purple-carpeted stairs.

“I think we’d have to start passing faster to be up to Bagman’s standards,” Harry replied.

“The Gryffindors certainly would, at least,” Draco said with a chuckle.

Harry laughed nervously, looking over his shoulder to make sure Hermione wasn’t near enough to overhear, but there was no sign of either her or the Weasleys among the mass of spectators. He turned back around with a relieved grin and fell into step behind the Malfoys.

They were soon caught up in the crowds now flooding out of the stadium and back to their campsites. Raucous singing was borne toward them on the night air as they retraced their steps along the lantern-lit path, and leprechauns kept shooting over their heads, cackling and waving their lanterns. When they finally reached the tents, nobody felt like sleeping at all, and given the level of noise around them, not even the fluffy feather beds up in Harry and Draco’s loft bedroom could have lulled them to sleep anyway.

Instead they relit the campfire and settled around it for hot cocoa and firewhiskey—although Mrs. Malfoy refused to let he and Draco have more than a sip of the latter. It burned Harry’s throat on the way down and made him cough and wheeze, tears streaming from his eyes while Mr. Malfoy chortled and pounded him on the back. Harry was just as glad to be forbidden any more of it. Draco protested that they should each have at least a glass but he didn’t protest very hard; from the way he sniffed and blinked after his own sip, Harry had a feeling that he didn’t really want more either and was only whining out of habit.

Several of the Malfoys’ friends dropped by as the night wore on and there was a great exchange of stories and bottles both. Harry didn’t mind at all this time; almost no one was looking at him, and Mr. Malfoy was too busy talking about the match to introduce Harry to anybody. Everyone was coming and going too quickly for Harry to keep track of names and faces even if he had wanted to, although he recognized Blaise Zabini and his mother; she greeted everyone with kisses smack on their lips, even Harry whom she didn’t know, and he blushed very hard. Blaise was too excited to remember to dislike Harry and they talked about Viktor Krum for several minutes before his mother dragged him away again, a group of admirers trailing behind.

Fireworks kept going off in the distance, punctuated by cheers and shouts. The adults got tipsier and tipsier and started singing songs that Harry didn’t recognize but hummed along to nonetheless. At one point Mr. Malfoy gave his wife a kiss on the cheek and swaggered off with a wink along with a few other wizards and witches who looked dimly familiar to Harry; he thought he might have met some of them earlier in the day. Mrs. Malfoy laughed and shook her head at them and waved for the little house-elf to pour everyone else more drinks. Nobody came to tell Harry and Draco that they had to go to bed.

Harry was content just to sit there in his nice comfortable armchair by the fire and watch it all. He felt very sleepy but far too excited to actually go to bed. He kept picturing some of Krum’s more spectacular moves. He was itching to get back on his own Firebolt and try out the Wronski Feint…. Now he knew what the move was really supposed to look like…. Harry saw himself in robes that had his name on the back, and imagined the sensation of hearing a hundred-thousand-strong crowd roar, as Ludo Bagman’s voice echoed throughout the stadium, “I give you… _Potter!”_

Harry never knew whether or not he had actually dropped off to sleep—his fantasies of flying like Krum might well have slipped into actual dreams—all he knew was that, quite suddenly, Draco was shaking his arm.

“Psst! Come on!” he whispered. “Before mother spots us!”

Harry blinked blearily and took off his glasses to rub his eyes. “Huh, what?” he said.

“Come on!” Draco repeated impatiently. “She’ll stop us if she notices. Hurry!”

Harry had no idea what was going on but he crammed his glasses back onto his nose and followed Draco away from the fire. They moved at a crouch, trying not to be seen. Harry looked over his shoulder; most of the party seemed to have broken-up, although there were still several people sitting and standing in front of the striped silk tent. One of the peacocks had broken its tether and was sitting on the roof but nobody else seemed to have noticed it and Draco was tugging Harry away by the elbow, giving him no chance to go back and tell somebody to get the bird down. He hoped it would be okay.

Draco pulled him into the shadows between two darkened tents. As soon as they were blocked from the sight of his mother he straightened up and started walking normally again, so Harry did the same. They were in a row of tents that were mostly dark; whatever celebrating had happened here had ended. Maybe the people sleeping here had been Bulgarian supporters. “Where are we going?” Harry asked in a whisper.

“You’ll see,” Draco replied smugly.

Harry dug his heels in to the grass. “Tell me now,” he insisted. If they got in trouble, the Malfoys might blame Harry, and they might send him back to the Dursleys for the rest of the summer. Harry wasn’t going to risk that without a good reason. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know exactly, all right?” Draco admitted. “I didn’t overhear everything, just enough to know that something’s up. Now do you want to go back to the tent so mother can usher us inside where it’s ‘safe’ or do you want to go see what’s happening?”

Harry decided there was nothing wrong with going to watch. Besides, he could always tell Mrs. Malfoy that he had gone along to make sure nothing bad happened to Draco.

“Let’s go,” he said. They resumed walking, picking their way carefully through the dark paths.

Dimly, Harry began to notice that something was wrong. The noises in the campsite had changed. The singing had stopped. He could hear screams, and the sound of people running. He swallowed. “I’m not sure about this,” he started to say, but then they crossed out onto a major pathway and stopped in their tracks.

By the light of the few fires that were still burning, he could see people running away into the woods, fleeing something that was moving across the field toward them, something that was emitting odd flashes of light and noises like gunfire. Loud jeering, roars of laughter, and drunken yells were drifting toward them; then came a burst of strong green light, which illuminated the scene.

A crowd of wizards, tightly packed and moving together with wands pointing straight upward, was marching slowly across the field. Harry squinted at them…. They didn’t seem to have faces…. Then he realized that their heads were hooded and their faces masked. High above them, floating along in midair, four struggling figures were being contorted into grotesque shapes. It was as though the masked wizards on the ground were puppeteers, and the people above them were marionettes operated by invisible strings that rose from the wands into the air. Two of the figures were very small.

More wizards and witches were joining the marching group, laughing and pointing up at the floating bodies. Tents crumpled and fell as the marching crowd swelled. Once or twice Harry saw one of the marchers blast a tent out of his way with his wand. Several caught fire. The screaming grew louder.

The floating people were suddenly illuminated as they passed over a burning tent and Harry recognized one of them: Mr. Roberts, the campsite manager. The other three looked as though they might be his wife and children. One of the marchers below flipped Mrs. Roberts upside down with his wand; her nightdress fell down to reveal voluminous drawers and she struggled to cover herself up as the crowd below her screeched and hooted with glee.

Draco burst out laughing, making Harry jump. He looked around to see what was funny but Draco was looking at the marching wizards. Harry turned back around. The smallest Muggle child had begun to spin like a top, his head flopping limply from side to side, sixty feet above the ground. Harry felt sick.

“That’s not funny,” he whispered.

Draco stopped laughing and frowned at him. “Oh come on,” he said. “Sure it is. Imagine if that was your aunt and uncle up there—and your great pig of a cousin! Tell me you wouldn’t be laughing then!”

Harry had to admit that that would have been an amusing sight, but the Roberts family wasn’t the Dursleys. As far as he knew, they hadn’t done anything to deserve this treatment. He saw several Ministry wizards running toward the crowd and hoped they would be able to put a stop to things.

Apparently some of Harry’s annoyance must have shown on his face because Draco pursed his lips in thought a moment, then said, “Come on, let’s get over into the woods where we can watch without getting caught-up in anything. All right?”

Harry couldn’t think of anything better to do so he followed Draco into the darkness.

They both looked back as they reached the trees. The crowd beneath the Roberts family was larger than ever; they could see the Ministry wizards trying to get through it to the hooded wizards in the center, but they were having great difficulty. It looked as though they were scared to perform any spell that might make the Roberts family fall.

The colored lanterns that had lit the path to the stadium had been extinguished. Dark figures were blundering through the trees; children were crying; anxious shouts and panicked voices were reverberating around them in the cold night air. Draco grabbed Harry’s hand before they could be separated and pulled him into a strand of trees on the edge of the wood. There was a small clearing where they could stand and see what was happening at the campsite through a gap in the trees. “Mother will never find us in here,” Draco said, grinning. He leaned back against a tree to watch and folded his arms, looking utterly relaxed. Harry tried to mimic his pose and attitude but he felt restless.

He could hear the sounds of people moving all around them but no one stepped off the path into their clearing. Harry was on the verge of suggesting that they should go back to the tent and try to find Draco’s parents when he heard a familiar voice yell in pain and an even more familiar one say, “What happened? Ron, where are you? Oh, this is stupid— _Lumos!_ ”

A flare of light illuminated the darkness behind Harry. He turned around and by its narrow beam he saw Ron Weasley lying sprawled on the ground.

“Tripped over a tree root,” he said angrily, getting to his feet again. It was Hermione who was holding the illuminated wand, of course, and Hermione who had spoken when Ron fell. Neither of them seemed to have spotted Harry and Draco yet. Harry was relieved; he didn’t want to talk to either of them right now and he hoped they would go away again without realizing he was there.

Draco obviously didn’t feel the same. “Well, with feet that size, hard not to,” he said in a drawling voice.

Hermione and Ron turned sharply. Ron told Draco to do something that Harry knew he would never have dared say in front of Professor Snape.

“Language, Weasley,” said Draco, his pale eyes glittering. “Hadn’t you better be hurrying along, now? You wouldn’t like _her_ spotted, would you?”

He nodded at Hermione, and at the same moment, a blast like a bomb sounded from the campsite, and a flash of green light momentarily lit the trees around them.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” said Hermione defiantly. Harry frowned, looking over his shoulder at the distant floating figures, a feeling of unease he couldn’t place growing in his stomach.

“You’re Harry’s friend so consider it free advice,” Draco said in a friendly voice. “I’d get a move on if I were you—not that I ever would be.” He laughed. “Or haven’t you figured out that they’re after Muggles?”

“Hermione’s a witch,” Harry said, feeling like he was missing something important.

Draco rolled his eyes. “I know,” he said, grimacing, “but if you think _they_ can’t spot a Mu—a Muggle-born…just get out of here, Granger, before you’re up there showing off your knickers in midair. Pretty sure _nobody_ wants to see _that.”_ He chortled. “Sounds like they’re coming this way,” he added sharply, when both Hermione and Ron opened their mouths to argue.

There came a bang from the other side of the trees that was louder than anything they had heard. Several people nearby screamed. Draco chuckled softly.

“Scare easily, don’t they?” he said in the same lazy voice he had used when talking about Lynch’s flying earlier. “I suppose your daddy told you to take her and hide?” he asked Ron. “What’s he up to—trying to rescue the Muggles?”

“And where are your parents?” Ron retorted, his face red. “Out there wearing masks, are they?”

Harry jerked backwards, startled; surely Weasley couldn’t really think that the Malfoys would be part of that nasty crowd?

Draco kept smiling, unperturbed. “Well…if they were, I wouldn’t be likely to tell you, would I, Weasley?” he sneered.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Harry said. “Either of you. We should all go if they’re coming over here, come on. Safety in numbers, right?”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Draco said, at the same moment that Ron said, “Like Hell I’m going anywhere with him!”

“Oh come on,” said Hermione, with a disgusted look at both of them, “let’s go and find the others.”

“Do you want to get caught?” Harry asked Draco, who gave a long suffering sigh and threw up his hands in surrender.

“Be a lot worse to get caught with _her_ than on our own,” he muttered under his breath. “All they’ll tell _us_ to do is go back to our tent….”

Harry pretended not to hear him.

“Who are you looking for?” he asked Hermione. The two of them set off, using the light of her wand to watch for treeroots; having no other choice Draco and Ron fell in behind, glaring daggers at each other.

“Ginny and Fred and George,” Hermione replied and Harry instantly regretted deciding to go with her. He had nothing against Ginny—she had been nice to him ever since he’d saved her life—but her older brothers, the twins, were two of Harry’s least favorite people at Hogwarts. They were pranksters who had a particular dislike for Slytherins, for Quidditch players who flew against Gryffindor, and for Harry individually. He could understand the first two concerns, but he wasn’t sure what he had done to earn their personal ire—other than save their sister’s life of course, which to his mind did not justify their antics, although it had paid-off nicely when they had given him the Marauder’s Map. Harry didn’t think they would be so generous if he ran into them now, though. He racked his brain for an excuse so he and Draco could split-off from Hermione and Ron without Harry having to admit he’d made a mistake, but he couldn’t think of anything.

Fortunately Fred, George, and Ginny were nowhere to be seen, though the path was packed with plenty of other people, all looking nervously over their shoulders toward the commotion back at the campsite. A huddle of teenagers in pajamas were arguing vociferously a little way along the path. When they saw Harry, Draco, Hermione, and Ron, a girl with thick curly hair turned and said quickly, _“Ou est Madame Maxime? Nouse l’avons perdue—”_

“Er—what?” said Ron.

 _““Je ne connais pas Madame Maxime,”_ Draco replied, shooting a smug glance at Ron. _“Désolé.”_

“Oh…” The girl who had spoken turned her back on him, and as they walked on they distinctly heard her say, “’Ogwarts.”

“Beauxbatons,” muttered Hermione.

“Sorry?” said Harry.

“She said Beauxbatons,” Draco repeated loudly, as though Harry were Crabbe or Goyle and had just asked a very stupid question. “I think Maxime is the name of the headmistress there, isn’t it? Beauxbatons Academy of Magic? You know?”

From the name Harry figured that it must be another magical school, like Durmstrang. “Oh…yeah…right,” he said.

“Fred and George can’t have gone that far,” said Ron, walking a little faster to put more distance between himself and Draco. He pulled out his wand, lighting it like Hermione’s, and squinted up the path. Harry dug in the pockets of his jacket for his own wand—but it wasn’t there. The only thing he could find was his Omnioculars.

“Ah, no, I don’t believe it…I’ve lost my wand!”

“You’re kidding!”

Ron and Hermione turned and raised their wands high enough to spread the narrow beams of light farther on the ground; Harry looked all around him, but his wand was nowhere to be seen. Draco stood stock-still, staring at Harry with as much horror on his face as though Harry had just admitted to chopping off his own arm. “You lost your _wand?_ ” he echoed, breathless.

“Maybe it’s back in your tent,” said Ron.

“Maybe it fell out of your pocket when you were standing in the trees?” Hermione suggested anxiously.

“Yeah,” said Harry, “maybe…”

He usually kept his wand with him at all times in the Wizarding world, and after how embarrassed he had been to not have it with him yesterday he had been especially careful to make sure he’d put it in his pocket when he got dressed today. Finding himself without it in the midst of a scene like this made him feel very vulnerable.

“Well let’s go back and find it!” Draco said. His voice was shrill. “Or—no, you don’t want to be without a wand in the middle of all that. Maybe—maybe going on toward the stadium is best, hide there…I can’t believe you don’t have your _wand_ , of all the idiotic things,” he muttered. “Even Goyle knows to carry his wand with him, and he can barely use it….”

“I had it this morning,” Harry insisted hotly. “I know I did. I don’t know what happened to it….”

A rustling noise nearby made all four of them jump. Winky the house-elf was fighting her way out of a clump of bushes nearby. She was moving in a most peculiar fashion, apparently with great difficulty; it was as though someone invisible were trying to hold her back.

“There is bad wizards about!” she squeaked distractedly as she leaned forward and labored to keep running. “People high—high in the air! Winky is getting out of the way!”

And she disappeared into the trees on the other side of the path, panting and squeaking as she fought the force that was restraining her.

“What’s up with her?” said Ron, looking curiously after Winky. “Why can’t she run properly?”

“Maybe something’s wrong with her legs?” Harry suggested halfheartedly. It didn’t seem like a very good explanation but he wasn’t about to admit to being as confused as Ron Weasley.

“No,” Draco shook his head, “nobody would keep a house-elf around if it couldn’t move well enough to work. What would be the point?”

“That’s a horrible thing to say!” Hermione exclaimed shrilly.

“Well it’s true,” said Draco. “You get a house-elf so it can do work, not hobble around. Probably she got hit with a stray Impediment Jinx or something.” He sounded bored.

“Then we should help her, take the jinx off,” Hermione insisted.

“It’s just a house-elf, Granger,” Draco said, rolling his eyes. “Nobody cares.”

“I care!” Hermione began hotly. “And you should too. Every living creature deserves decent treatment and—”

Another loud bang echoed from the edge of the wood.

“Let’s just keep moving, shall we?” said Ron. “The elf’s already gone and you’re not going to find her in the dark. She’ll be fine, come on.” Harry saw him glance edgily at Hermione. Perhaps there was truth in what Draco had said; perhaps Hermione _was_ in more danger than they were. They set off again, Harry still searching his pockets, even though he knew his wand wasn’t there.

They followed the dark path deeper into the wood, still keeping an eye out for Fred, George, and Ginny. Harry wasn’t sure what he would do if he were the one to spot them first: point them out or turn the others in the opposite direction. They passed a group of goblins who were cackling over a sack of gold that they had undoubtedly won betting on the match, and who seemed quite unperturbed by the trouble at the campsite. Farther still along the path, they walked into a patch of silvery light, and when they looked through the trees, they saw three tall and beautiful veela standing in a clearing, surrounded by a gaggle of young wizards, all of whom were talking very loudly.

“I pull down about a hundred sacks of Galleons a year!” one of them shouted. “I’m a dragon killer for the Committee for the Disposal of Dangerous Creatures.”

“No you’re not!” yelled his friend. “You’re a dishwasher at the Leaky Cauldron…but I’m a vampire hunter, I’ve killed about ninety so far—”

A third young wizard, whose pimples were visible even by the dim, silvery light of the veela, now cut in, “I’m about to become the youngest-ever Minister of Magic, I am.”

Harry snorted with laughter. He recognized the pimply wizard: His name was Stan Shunpike, and he was in fact a conductor on the triple-decker Knight Bus. He turned to tell this to Draco, but the oddly-closed look on his pointed face made Harry hesitate. Then suddenly Ron was yelling, “Did I tell you I’ve invented a broomstick that’ll reach Jupiter?”

 _“Honestly!”_ said Hermione, and she grabbed Ron by the arm. Harry jumped to help and together they wheeled him around and marched him away. Harry worried that Draco had been entranced too until he heard the familiar sound of his friend’s scornful snickering behind him. By the time the sounds of the veela and their admirers had faded completely, they were in the very heart of the wood. They seemed to be alone now; everything was much quieter.

Harry looked around. “I reckon we can just wait here, you know,” he said, thinking about Fred and George Weasley and how much he didn’t want to find them, especially without his wand. “We’ll hear anyone coming a mile off.”

The words were hardly out of his mouth, when Ludo Bagman emerged from behind a tree right in front of them.

Even by the feeble light of the two wands, Harry could see that a great change had come over Bagman. He no longer looked buoyant and rosy-faced; there was no more spring in his step. He looked very white and strained.

“Who’s that?” he said, blinking down at them, trying to make out their faces. “What are you doing in here, all alone?”

They looked at one another, surprised.

“Well—there’s a sort of riot going on,” said Ron. Draco snorted.

Bagman stared at them.

“What?”

“At the campsite…some _people_ ,” Ron glared at Draco, “have got hold of a family of Muggles. People in _masks_ , like….”

Bagman swore loudly.

“Damn them!” he said, looking quite distracted, and without another word, he Disapparated with a small _pop!_

“Not exactly on top of things, Mr. Bagman, is he?” said Hermione, frowning.

“He was a great Beater, though,” said Ron, leading the way off the path into a small clearing, and sitting down on a patch of dry grass at the foot of a tree. “The Wimbourne Wasps won the league three times in a row while he was with them.”

“Everyone knows that,” Draco sneered, but he reluctantly followed Ron into the clearing with the others.

Ron reached into his pocket and took out one of the miniature players that Harry had debated the merits of purchasing. Ron’s was of Viktor Krum. He set it down on the ground and watched it walk around. Like the real Krum, the model was slightly duck-footed and round-shouldered, much less impressive on his splayed feet than on his broomstick. Harry was listening for noise from the campsite. Everything seemed much quieter; perhaps the riot was over.

“I can’t believe you made us leave when everything was getting so interesting,” Draco complained after a while, kicking at a rock.

Ron glared up at him. “You call that _interesting?_ ” he growled.

Draco raised his eyebrows. “Were you bored?” he asked pointedly.

“I hope the others are okay,” said Hermione, trying to head-off a fight.

“They’ll be fine,” said Ron.

“Unless they do something stupid,” Draco added.

“Draco!” Harry snapped. “Don’t be a jerk.”

Draco rolled his eyes. “Oh, of course they’ll be fine,” he said. “More’s the pity,” he added under his breath. Harry chose to pretend he hadn’t heard the second part.

“Of course,” Ron said loudly, “I think it’ll be real interesting once they’ve caught all those freaks in masks out there and pulled those masks off.”

“You think the Ministry is going to catch them?” Draco scoffed. “Please. They don’t have the forces here to handle that. No Aurors, just basic security. What are _they_ going to do?”

“You might be surprised,” Ron said shortly.

“I doubt it,” said Draco. He leaned back against a tree trunk and closed his eyes, as if he had run out of interest in things that Ron Weasley might say.

Harry sat down on a tree-stump opposite Ron and watched the small figure of Krum slouching over the fallen leaves. “You don’t need to be a jerk either,” he muttered. “You know Draco’s parents aren’t _really_ mixed-up in that.”

Ron gave Harry a very funny look and said nothing.

“Those poor Muggles, though,” said Hermione nervously. “What if they can’t get them down?”

“They will,” said Ron reassuringly. “They’ll find a way.”

“If they care enough to try,” Draco teased, leaning forward, his eyes glittering in the wandlight. “I don’t know, it might be an improvement to leave them up there. What do you think, Harry?”

“I think the whole thing is creepy,” Harry said. “Dancing people around like puppets—what has the Roberts family ever done to any of them?”

“You can’t be too careful of Muggles,” Draco murmured. He closed his eyes again. Harry frowned.

“I don’t think—” Harry began, but he broke off abruptly and looked over his shoulder. Draco looked up too and Ron and Hermione turned around quickly. It sounded as though someone was staggering toward their clearing. They waited, listening to the sounds of the uneven steps behind the dark trees. But the footsteps came to a sudden halt.

“Hello?” called Harry, ignoring Draco’s attempts to shush him.

There was silence. Harry got to his feet and peered around the tree. It was too dark to see very far, but he could sense somebody standing just beyond the range of his vision.

“Who’s there?” he said.

And then, without warning, the silence was rent by a voice unlike any they had heard in the wood; and it uttered, not a panicked shout, but what sounded like a spell.

_“MORSMORDRE!”_

And something vast, green, and glittering erupted from the patch of darkness Harry’s eyes had been struggling to penetrate; it flew up over the treetops and into the sky.

“What the—?” gasped Ron as he sprang to his feet again, staring up at the thing that had appeared.

For a split second, Harry thought it was another leprechaun formation. Then he realized that it was a colossal skull, comprised of what looked like emerald stars, with a serpent protruding from its mouth like a tongue. As they watched, it rose higher and higher, blazing in a haze of greenish smoke, etched against the black sky like a new constellation.

“No way!” Draco squeaked.

Suddenly, the wood all around them erupted with screams. Harry didn’t understand why, but the only possible cause was the sudden appearance of the skull, which had now risen high enough to illuminate the entire wood like some grisly neon sign. He scanned the darkness for the person who had conjured the skull, but he couldn’t see anyone.

“Who’s there?” he called again.

“Shut-up!” Draco grabbed his arm and tried to tug him away. His face was twisted in an odd expression that Harry couldn’t make out, something halfway between fright and glee. “The Ministry is going to be here any second, we don’t want to be caught near that!”

“Harry he’s right, we need to go!” Hermione grabbed his other arm and tugged him forward.

“What’s the matter?” Harry said, as startled to see the two of them in agreement about something as he was to see her face so white and terrified.

“It’s the Dark Mark, Harry!” Hermione moaned, pulling him as hard as she could. Between her and Draco, Harry could do nothing but stumble forward. “You-Know-Who’s Sign!”

 _“You-Know-Who’s—?_ ”

“Harry, come _on!_ ”

Harry stopped resisting, the three of them stumbling away together across the clearing. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Ron, the miniature figure of Krum flailing in his hand, moving toward them—but before they had taken more than a few hurried steps, a series of popping noises announced the arrival of twenty wizards, appearing from thin air, surrounding them.

Harry whirled around, and in an instant, he registered one fact: Each of these wizards had his wand out, and every wand was pointed right at himself, Draco, Hermione, and Ron.

Without pausing to think, he yelled, “DUCK!”

He seized Draco and Hermione and pulled them down onto the ground; Ron was too far away and Harry was out of hands. He was on his own.

 _“STUPEFY!”_ roared twenty voices—there was a blinding series of flashes and Harry felt the hair on his head ripple as though a powerful wind had swept the clearing. Raising his head a fraction of an inch he saw jets of fiery red light flying over them from the wizards’ wands, crossing one another, bouncing off tree trunks, rebounding into the darkness. At least three jets of light connected with Ron’s body and he went sprawling, the miniature Krum tumbling away out of sight—

“Stop!” yelled a voice that Harry recognized. “STOP! _That’s my son!_ ”

Harry’s hair stopped blowing about. He raised his head a little higher. The wizard in front of him had lowered his wand. He rolled over and saw Mr. Weasley running toward them, looking terrified. “Ron, Ron!” he yelled. “Ron, are you all right?”

Ron didn’t answer or move. Mr. Weasley dropped to his knees next to his son and pointed his wand at Ron’s chest. _“Rennervate,_ ” he said. His voice sounded shaky. “Ron, are you all right?” he asked again.

Ron sat up with a groan. “Whassat—where—?” he mumbled.

“Out of the way, Arthur,” said a cold, curt voice. It belonged to a wizard that Harry didn’t know. He was a stiff, upright, elderly man, dressed in an impeccably crisp suit and tie. The parting in his short gray hair was almost unnaturally straight, and his narrow toothbrush mustache looked as though he trimmed it using a slide rule. His shoes were very highly polished. He and the other Ministry wizards were closing in on them. Harry got to his feet to face them. The elderly wizard’s face was taut with rage.

Rather than moving away, Mr. Weasley helped his son sit up and wrapped an arm around his shoulders. The gray-haired wizard ignored Mr. Weasley and pointed his wand at Ron.

“Which of you did it?” he snapped, his sharp eyes darting between them. “Which of you conjured the Dark Mark?”

“We didn’t do that!” said Harry, gesturing up at the skull.

“We didn’t do anything,” Hermione sobbed. “Please, we didn’t do anything!” She had crawled over to Ron and Mr. Weasley on her hands and knees and was clinging to Ron’s arm as tears streamed down her face. Ron just looked confused, staring blearily between his father, the weeping Hermione, and the angry wizards standing around them all.

Draco was still crouching on the ground as well, which surprised Harry; he would have expected his friend to already be blustering about how much trouble these wizards would be in once his father found out that they had threatened him. Instead he was keeping his head down, at though to avoid catching anyone’s eye. Harry’s heart sank. If Draco would rather keep quiet than send for his parents to help, that meant the amount of trouble they would be in if— _when_ —the Malfoys learned that they had sneaked away was going to be astronomical. Harry wondered how the Dursleys would react when he showed-up on their doorstep tomorrow.

“What did you want to attack us for?” Ron asked weakly, rubbing his chest. “We were just standing here….”

“Do not lie, sir!” shouted the elderly wizard. His wand was still pointing directly at Ron, and his eyes were popping—he looked slightly mad. “You have been discovered at the scene of the crime!”

“Barty,” whispered a witch in a long woolen dressing gown, “they’re kids, Barty, they’d never have been able to—”

“Where did the Mark come from, Hermione?” said Mr. Weasley quickly.

“Over there,” said Hermione shakily, pointing at the place where they had heard the voice. “There was someone behind the trees…they shouted words—an incantation—”

“Oh, stood over there, did they?” said Barty, turning his popping eyes on Hermione now, disbelief etched all over his face. “Said an incantation, did they? You seem very well informed about how the Mark is summoned, missy—”

But none of the Ministry wizards apart from the elderly Barty seemed to think it was remotely likely that Harry, Hermione, Ron, or Draco had conjured the skull; on the contrary, at Hermione’s words, they had all raised their wands again and were pointing in the direction she had indicated, squinting through the trees.

“We’re too late,” said the witch in the woolen dressing gown, shaking her head. “They’ll have Disapparated.”

“I don’t think so,” said a wizard with a scrubby brown beard. He looked vaguely familiar; Harry felt a flash of hope that he was one of the Malfoys’ friends from earlier, but the wizard wasn’t looking at them. “Our Stunners went right through those trees….There’s a good chance we got them….”

“Amos, be careful!” said a few of the wizards warningly as Amos squared his shoulders, raised his wand, marched across the clearing, and disappeared into the darkness. Hermione watched him vanish with her hands over her mouth.

A few seconds later, they heard Amos shout.

“Yes! We got them! There’s someone here! Unconscious! It’s—but—blimey…”

“You’ve got someone?” shouted Barty, sounding highly disbelieving. “Who? Who is it?”

They heard snapping twigs, the rustling of leaves, and then crunching footsteps as Amos reemerged from behind the trees. He was carrying a tiny, limp figure in his arms. Harry recognized the tea towel at once. It was Winky.

The elderly wizard did not move or speak as Amos deposited the elf on the ground at his feet. The other Ministry wizards were all staring at him. For a few seconds he remained transfixed, his eyes blazing in his white face as he stared down at Winky. Then he appeared to come to life again.

“This—cannot—be,” he said jerkily. “No—”

He moved quickly around Amos and strode off toward the place where he had found Winky.

“No point, Mr. Crouch,” Amos called after him. “There’s no one else there.”

But Mr. Crouch did not seem prepared to take his word for it. They could hear him moving around and the rustling of leaves as he pushed the bushes aside, searching.

“Bit embarrassing,” Amos said grimly, looking down at Winky’s unconscious form. “Barty Crouch’s house-elf…I mean to say…”

“Come off it, Amos,” said Mr. Weasley quietly, “you don’t seriously think it was the elf? The Dark Mark’s a wizard’s sign. It requires a wand.”

“Yeah,” said Amos, “and she _had_ a wand.”

 _“What?”_ said Mr. Weasley. He sat up sharply, jostling Ron, who fell to his elbows with a grunt.

 _“What?”_ echoed Draco, scandalized, then flinched as several people seemed to notice him for the first time. He ducked his head again and inched closer to Harry.

Amos wasn’t paying attention. “Here, look.” He held up a wand and showed it to Mr. Weasley. “Had it in her hand. So that’s clause three of the Code of Wand Use broken, for a start. _No non-human creature is permitted to carry or use a wand._ ”

Just then there was another _pop_ , and Ludo Bagman Apparated right next to Mr. Weasley. Looking breathless and disoriented, he spun on the spot, goggling upward at the emerald-green skull.

“The Dark Mark!” he panted, almost trampling Winky as he turned inquiringly to his colleagues. “Who did it? Did you get them? Barty! What’s going on?”

Mr. Crouch had returned empty-handed. His face was still ghostly white, and his hands and his toothbrush mustache were both twitching.

“Where have you been, Barty?” said Bagman. “Why weren’t you at the match? Your elf was saving you a seat too—gulping gargoyles!” Bagman had just noticed Winky lying at his feet. “What happened to _her_?”

“I have been busy, Ludo,” said Mr. Crouch, still talking in the same jerky fashion, barely moving his lips. “And my elf has been Stunned.”

“Stunned? By you lot, you mean? But why—?”

Comprehension dawned suddenly on Bagman’s round, shiny face; he looked up at the skull, down at Winky, and then at Mr. Crouch.

 _“No!”_ he said. “Winky? Conjure the Dark Mark? She wouldn’t know how! She’d need a wand, for a start!”

“And she had one,” said Amos. “I found her holding one, Ludo. If it’s all right with you, Mr. Crouch, I think we should hear what she’s got to say for herself.”

Crouch gave no sign that he had heard Amos, but Amos seemed to take his silence for assent. He raised his own wand, pointed it at Winky, and said, _“Rennervate!”_

Winky stirred feebly. Her great brown eyes opened and she blinked several times in a bemused sort of way. Watched by the silent wizards, she raised herself shakily into a sitting position. She caught sight of Amos’s feet, and slowly, tremulously, raised her eyes to stare up into his face; then, more slowly still, she looked up into the sky. Harry could see the floating skull reflected twice in her enormous, glassy eyes. She gave a gasp, looked wildly around the crowded clearing, and burst into terrified sobs.

“Elf!” said Amos sternly. “Do you know who I am? I’m a member of the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures!”

Winky began to rock backward and forward on the ground, her breath coming in sharp bursts. Harry was reminded forcibly of Dobby’s behavior when he had been explaining why he was trying to half-murder Harry.

“As you see, elf, the Dark Mark was conjured here a short while ago,” said Amos. “And you were discovered moments later, right beneath it! An explanation, if you please!”

“I—I—I is not doing it, sir!” Winky gasped. “I is not knowing how, sir!”

“You were found with a wand in your hand!” barked Amos, brandishing it in front of her. And as the wand caught the green light that was filling the clearing from the skull above, Harry recognized it.

“Hey—that’s mine!” he said.

Everyone in the clearing looked at him. Draco flapped his hands in a panicked gesture for silence but it was too late. Harry swallowed.

“Excuse me?” said Amos, incredulously.

“I said…that’s my wand,” Harry admitted. He wasn’t sure why Draco thought it was a bad idea to claim his wand, but he couldn’t take the words back so there was no point pretending otherwise now. “I dropped it.”

 “You dropped it?” repeated Amos in disbelief. “Is this a confession? You threw it aside after you conjured the Mark?”

“Amos, think about who you’re talking to!” said Mr. Weasley, very nervously. “Is _Harry Potter_ likely to conjure the Dark Mark?”

“Er—of course not,” mumbled Amos. “Sorry…carried away….”

From the way a few of the wizards were eyeing Harry and Draco, they weren’t all as easily convinced.

“I didn’t drop it there, anyway,” said Harry, jerking his thumb toward the trees beneath the skull. “I missed it right after we got into the wood.”

“It’s true,” Draco said, “he told us all it was missing ages ago.” He made a frantic little waving motion at Hermione, urging her to speak up, but it was Ron who croaked, “Yeah, he did. We all looked for it. Couldn’t find it anywhere.” Mr. Weasley shushed him.

“So,” said Amos, his eyes hardening as he turned to look at Winky again, cowering at his feet. “You found this wand, eh, elf? And you picked it up and thought you’d have some fun with it, did you?”

“I is not doing magic with it, sir!” squealed Winky, tears streaming down the sides of her squashed and bulbous nose. “I is…I is…I is just picking it up, sir! I is not making the Dark Mark, sir, I is not knowing how!”

“It wasn’t her!” said Hermione. She looked very nervous, speaking up in front of all these Ministry wizards, yet determined all the same. “Winky’s got a squeaky little voice, and the voice we heard doing the incantation was much deeper!” She looked around at Ron, Harry, and Draco, appealing for their support. “It didn’t sound anything like Winky, did it?”

“No,” said Harry, shaking his head. “It definitely didn’t sound like an elf.”

“Yeah, it was a human voice,” said Ron. Draco said nothing but he did nod, once, very tersely.

“Well, we’ll soon see,” growled Amos, looking unimpressed. “There’s a simple way of discovering the last spell a wand performed, elf, did you know that?”

Winky trembled and shook her head frantically, her ears flapping, as Amos raised his own wand again and placed it tip to tip with Harry’s.

 _“Prior Incantato!”_ roared Amos.

Harry heard Hermione gasp, horrified, as a gigantic serpent-tongued skull erupted from the point where the two wands met, but it was a mere shadow of the green skull high above them; it looked as though it were made of thick gray smoke: the ghost of a spell.

 _“Deletrius!”_ Amos shouted, and the smoky skull vanished in a wisp of smoke.

“So,” said Amos with a kind of savage triumph, looking down upon Winky, who was still shaking convulsively.

“I is not doing it!” she squealed, her eyes rolling in terror. “I is not, I is not, I is not knowing how! I is a good elf, I isn’t using wands, I isn’t knowing how!”

 _“You’ve been caught red-handed, elf!”_ Amos roared. _“Caught with the guilty wand in your hand!”_

“Amos,” said Mr. Weasley loudly, “think about it…precious few wizards know how to do that spell…. Where would she have learned it?”

“Perhaps Amos is suggesting,” said Mr. Crouch, cold anger in every syllable, “that I routinely teach my servants to conjure the Dark Mark?”

There was a deeply unpleasant silence. Amos looked horrified. “Mr. Crouch…not…not at all…”

“You have now come very close to accusing the two people in this clearing who are _least_ likely to conjure that Mark!” barked Mr. Crouch. “Harry Potter—and myself! I suppose you are familiar with the boy’s story, Amos?”

“Of course—everyone knows—” muttered Amos, looking highly discomforted.

“And I trust you remember the many proofs I have given, over a long career, that I despise and detest the Dark Arts and those who practice them?” Mr. Crouch shouted, his eyes bulging again.

“Mr. Crouch, I—I never suggested you had anything to do with it!” Amos muttered again, now reddening behind his scrubby brown beard.

“If you accuse my elf, you accuse me, Diggory!” shouted Mr. Crouch. “Where else would she have learned to conjure it?”

“She—she might’ve picked it up anywhere—” Amos Diggory’s eyes landed on Draco. “Ah!” he exclaimed, “you! You’re the Malfoys’ boy, aren’t you? Well? Speak up?”

“Yes!” Draco yelped. “Yes, of course! I’m Draco Malfoy. What of it?” His chin jutted up defiantly. Harry saw him twitch his fingers in an instinctive beckoning gesture, but Crabbe and Goyle were too far away to come and help him now.

Diggory took a step closer. “And what do _you_ know about the Dark Mark up there, eh?”

“N-nothing,” Draco stuttered. His defiance drained away in an instant and the green light of the skull gave his pallid face a strange, sickly look.

“He was with us,” Harry said loudly. “None of us saw who did it!”

“That—that’s right!” Draco gasped. “I was with Harry, with Harry Potter, we were together the whole time, the four of us—”

“Quiet!” Diggory barked. He looked speculatively at Harry’s wand. “So,” he said, pointing it at Draco, “someone used this wand to cast the Dark Mark. Someone smart enough to know better than to use their own wand. Someone who knew how to conjure the Mark, and had the opportunity to get their hands on Harry Potter’s wand. Who do you think could have done that, Mr. Malfoy?”

“I—I don’t know,” Draco said, wilting. “Why are you asking me?” he whined.

“Because I think it was you, of course!” roared Diggory. “Do you deny it?”

“How dare you?” screeched a voice behind Harry. There were two _pop_ sounds in quick succession and next moment, Narcissa Malfoy stood next to Amos Diggory, her wand pointed at his chest. “How dare you accuse my son!”

Diggory stumbled backwards, startled, and several people raised their wands again. Mrs. Malfoy didn’t cast any spells but instead wrapped both arms tightly around her son’s thin shoulders. “Is that your usual investigative technique in the Department of Magical Creature Regulation?” she snapped, glaring at Diggory, who continued to gape at her. “Just start bullying everyone who’s nearby until somebody gives in and confesses? Where are the Aurors? Where are the officers of the Magical Law Enforcement Patrol? I demand that someone take responsibility for this—this travesty of justice!”

“I am in control here, Mrs. Malfoy,” said Crouch stiffly, drawing himself up so he could look down his nose at her. “Mr. Diggory is simply—”

“Bullying children!” Mrs. Malfoy retorted. “Yes, I could see exactly what he was doing, and I say again, how dare you! How dare all of you! Grown witches and wizards, pushing around innocent schoolchildren!”

“And house-elves,” Hermione muttered, but nobody listened to her.

“Well, Mr. Diggory, I am no child to be cowed by an authoritative voice. Have you anything you would like to say to _me?_ ”

Once again Diggory looked discomforted, but not as much as when Mr. Crouch had been shouting at him. “You have to admit, Mrs. Malfoy, the circumstances are suspicious. What were your son and these other children doing here?”

“Fleeing that silly riot you all failed to control, I expect,” Mrs. Malfoy replied promptly. “Or were you enjoying shouting at the children so much that you forgot the mess you left behind out there?” She waved vaguely in the direction of the campsite, her wand still in her hand. A single red spark leaped from the tip, making several people jump.

“We are trying to determine who conjured the Dark Mark,” Diggory began, speaking through gritted teeth.

“And you think it was my son?” Mrs. Malfoy interrupted. Her blue eyes blazed like lightning. “May I ask _why_ you suspect him?”

“Means, motive, and opportunity, of course,” Diggory shot back. “You deny he had all three?”

“Of course I do!” Two bright red spots appeared in Mrs. Malfoy’s pallid cheeks. “What exactly are you implying?”

“I believe that Amos is concerned that, given your family history—”

“My family history?” Mrs. Malfoy repeated in a voice that would have chilled a dementor. “I suppose you are referring to my sister, are you?”

“Well…” Diggory could no longer meet her eyes. “Her and—and others….” Several of the wizards standing nearby frowned and shifted uncomfortably; others stared hard at Mrs. Malfoy without flinching.

“I _see!_ ” Mrs. Malfoy released her grip on her son and turned to face Diggory head-on. Draco started to step forward next to her but she pushed him back, as though placing herself as a shield between them. “So never mind that all evidence showed that Lucius had never been a willing participant but rather a _victim_ himself; never mind that the information he provided helped you capture so many _true_ supporters of the Dark Lord; never mind that the Wizengamot found both of us innocent, oh no! Merely the _accusation_ of guilt is enough to tarnish a family’s reputation forever, I see! Having an Unforgivable cast upon you is a crime now! And as for my sister—well!” She rounded on Crouch suddenly. “Who here can say that their own families are wholly without failing? Who here has never had a relative to be shamed by, never felt the touch of scandal brush their family tree? And for that crime, you will hold my son responsible for—for this?” She waved a hand at the Dark Mark gleaming overhead.

Mr. Crouch looked like he had been turned to stone. No one spoke.

“He is a child!” Mrs. Malfoy snarled. “A child! How could he possibly know how to conjure the Dark Mark—unless you claim that _we_ taught him? We, who were ourselves _victims_ of the Dark Lord, who were tried and found innocent, you say now that we taught our son that spell? That he stole his friend’s wand to cast it with? And then did what, convinced these other children to lie for him to all of you? Convinced _Harry Potter_ to lie to all of you about who cast the Dark Mark?”

She glowered at the encircling wizards, most of whom now dropped their eyes to the ground rather than meeting Mrs. Malfoy’s eyes. “You might as well say that we taught Harry Potter himself how to cast the spell,” she continued furiously. “It was his wand, after all, and he has been a friend of our family since he re-entered the Wizarding world four years ago. We would have had plenty of time to instruct him in the incantation—if you think we know it? If you think we would be willing to teach it?” She advanced on Diggory. Her face was bloodless and her pale eyes blazed. She reminded Harry quite suddenly of the veela at the match and how they had changed from pretty, dancing creatures to fearsome beasts throwing fire. He swallowed hard and resolved to never, ever give Mrs. Malfoy a reason to be that angry with him.

“Please, Mr. Diggory, explain the aspersions you are casting.”

Diggory swallowed. “I—I may have jumped ahead of myself,” he mumbled. “Got—got carried away, you know. Stressful night, lots of things going wrong at once, a confusing situation….”

Mrs. Malfoy raised her chin imperiously. “That doesn’t sound like an apology to me,” she said.

Diggory’s eyes flashed to Crouch; he nodded. “I apologize, Mrs. Malfoy,” Diggory said tersely.

“To my son, if you please. It was he whom you unjustly accused.”

“I apologize…Draco.”

Draco hesitated, glancing toward his mother for a cue. “Very well,” he said, his voice haughty again. “I accept your apology, Mr. Diggory.”

“And to Harry,” Mrs. Malfoy added.

Diggory sighed and repeated his apology.

“Er—that’s all right,” said Harry, feeling awkward. “But may I, um…may I have my wand back, please?”

“Eh?” said Diggory. He looked at the second wand he was holding as though he had forgotten it was there. He swallowed hard then forced a smile. “Oh, well, I suppose we’ve gotten all we can from it. Yes, you might as well have it back.”

“Thank you.” Harry tucked it securely in his pocket and pressed his arm tight against it so that it could not fall out again. He could feel his face burning and hoped that the sickly green light hid his blush.

“Look, you’re all forgetting that we’ve actually got a witness,” the witch in the wooly dressing gown said. “The elf was right over there where it was conjured. She might have seen who did it. There’s no need for all these—these theatrics; just ask her what she saw.”

Diggory squared his shoulders as though pulling himself back together. “Elf,” he said sternly, “did you see anyone?”

Winky, now that everyone was looking at her again, began to tremble worse than ever. Her giant eyes flickered from Mr. Diggory to Ludo Bagman, and onto Mr. Crouch. Then she gulped and said, “I is seeing no one, sir…no one…”

“Amos,” said Mr. Crouch curtly, “I am fully aware that, in the ordinary course of events, you would want to take Winky into your department for questioning. I ask you, however, to allow me to deal with her.”

Mr. Diggory looked as though he didn’t think much of this suggestion at all, but it was clear to Harry that Mr. Crouch was such an important member of the Ministry that he did not dare refuse him.

“You may rest assured that she will be punished,” Mr. Crouch added coldly.

“M-m-master…” Winky stammered, looking up at Mr. Crouch, her eyes brimming with tears. “M-m-master, p-p-please…”

Mrs. Malfoy cleared her throat. “If no one has any other questions for the boys here, I would like to take them back to our tent—provided that it’s still standing and the Ministry hasn’t allowed the entire campsite to burn to ash, of course. It has been a very long night and I think we would all like to go to bed and try to put it behind us.”

Amos Diggory jumped as though he had forgotten she was there. Crouch didn’t look up from the trembling elf in front of him. Diggory looked around the circle at a few of the other wizards; they all shrugged.

“Very well,” he said. “If anything else comes up—”

“You know where to find us,” Mrs. Malfoy said loftily, and swept away toward the trees. Draco followed tight on her heels; Harry hesitated, looking back at Hermione and the Weasleys. “You okay?” he mouthed to Hermione, but before she could answer Mr. Weasley got to his feet.

 “I think I’ll take my lot back to our tent as well, if nobody’s got any objections,” he said. He bent down to help Ron up; he groaned when he stood, like an old man. Hermione managed a watery smile for Harry; he waved back and hurried to catch up to the Malfoys. They walked through the woods in silence, Mrs. Malfoy lighting the path with her wand held out in front of them. After a while they heard a pitiful shriek in the house-elf’s squeaky voice followed by hollow, racking sobs that gradually faded away behind them.

Draco started to speak. “Mother, did—”

“Not now,” Mrs. Malfoy hissed. “Not here.” Her face was hard and set like marble.

Draco swallowed and fell silent. None of them spoke as they walked back toward the campsite. They were all three of them walking very fast, as though anxious to leave the ugly scene behind them. Harry wondered where Mr. Malfoy was and if he was all right, but he didn’t dare ask.

When they reached the edge of the wood, their progress was impeded. A large crowd of frightened-looking witches and wizards was congregated there, and when they saw Mrs. Malfoy coming toward them, a few of them surged forward.

“What’s going on in there?”

“Who conjured it?”

“Narcissa, it’s not—is it _really_ —?”

“The Ministry has the situation well in hand,” Mrs. Malfoy said in a voice that dripped with sarcasm. Several people laughed nervously; others look frightened or angry. “I’m sure they’ll be happy to answer all your questions just as soon as they finish inventing some answers. If you’ll excuse me—”

She swept through the crowd, Draco and Harry on her heels. The walk back to the campsite was long and dark. All was quiet now; there was no sign of the masked wizards, though several ruined tents were sill smoking.

The Malfoys’ striped silk concoction was intact. Harry, counting quickly, thought the peacocks were all there as well. They hurried inside and the moment the tent flap fell closed behind them Mrs. Malfoy grabbed her son in a tight hug. “Mother,” he mumbled, but she didn’t let go for several minutes. Harry was starting to inch away when she finally released Draco and yanked Harry into a hard, tight embrace of his own. Harry had no memory of ever being hugged like this, as though by a mother. He was so shocked he didn’t even think to hug her back until she had already let go.

“Well.” Mrs. Malfoy moved away, looking flustered. “Draco, you’ll excuse me if I ask you just once: Did you conjure the Dark Mark?”

“No, mother,” Draco rolled his eyes, “I don’t even know the spell for it.”

“Of course, darling. And you, Harry?”

“What?” Harry goggled. “Er, no. No, of course not. I didn’t even know what it was until tonight. I _still_ don’t know what it is,” he added in a plaintive voice, hoping that someone would tell him.

“It was the Dark Lord’s sign,” Mrs. Malfoy said simply. She settled herself in a tall armchair by the stairs and waved for Harry and Draco to join her on the nearby couch. She pulled pins from her hair while she spoke. “He or his Death Eaters would leave it over a building to mark when they had been there; when they had killed, or done something else of import.” Her voice was calm but Harry noticed that her fingers shook. “Of course, it hasn’t been seen for thirteen years, so its reappearance tonight was—was startling.”

Harry thought of the screams in the woods and nodded.

There was silence for a moment. Mrs. Malfoy broke it when she clapped her hands, summoning their house-elf. “I think we could all use some nice calming tea,” she announced. “Lavender, valerian, and mint will do. Fo—three cups.” The elf bowed and whisked away into the silk-walled room that concealed the tent’s kitchen.

“Mother, where’s father?” Draco asked. “Is he all right?”

“I’m sure he’s fine, darling,” Mrs. Malfoy said quickly. “Perfectly fine. He’s probably out looking for us, so we’ll stay right here to prevent some absurd comedy of errors where we all go rushing about every which way, missing one another by moments.” She clasped her fingers together in front of her to stop them trembling. Harry saw that her knuckles were white.

Draco frowned but flopped back sulkily in his seat. Harry caught himself compulsively checking his wand every few seconds and sat on his hands to stop himself.

The elf brought the tea. It smelled sharp and earthy but not unpleasant; the mint and lavender were light enough to compensate for the bitter note of the valerian.

Harry sipped it dutifully because Mrs. Malfoy told them both to drink but his mind was whirling and he didn’t think he’d be able to sleep, no matter how calming the tea was. Who had conjured the Dark Mark? Had they been with the group of masked wizards? And all the things Mrs. Malfoy had said to Mr. Diggory and Mr. Crouch—what had all that been about? He wished he dared ask but Mrs. Malfoy kept darting nervous glances at the door flap and ignoring her own tea. He didn’t want to say anything that might upset her more.

Finally, after what seemed like years later but was probably only minutes (the tea was still hot) the tent flap opened and Mr. Malfoy burst inside. He looked even more frantic than his wife had in the forest and his fancy green robes were gone, replaced by plain black ones, slightly tattered. A trickle of dried blood marked one side of his face and his gray eyes were wide and wild. “Cissy,” he exclaimed, “Draco, there you are! I’ve been looking for you both everywhere! What happened? Are you all right?” He gave Harry a quick glance, as though to reassure himself that he was there too, and strode quickly to his wife’s side. She clutched his hands like a drowning woman might grab a rope.

“We’re fine,” Mrs. Malfoy said. Her voice cracked. “Did they—did anyone—?”

“The Ministry didn’t catch any of the culprits,” Mr. Malfoy said, dropping heavily into a chair. He swallowed Mrs. Malfoy’s untouched tea in a single gulp, made a face, and continued: “Didn’t even manage to unmask anybody. Everyone Disapparated the moment the Mark appeared. When I got back here and found you all gone—”

“It was my fault, father,” Draco interrupted. He looked pale and guilty. “I wanted a closer look, so Harry and I sneaked away. We were watching from the woods, and then somebody took Harry’s wand and used it to conjure the Dark Mark, and the Ministry thought it was us, only mother came along and stopped them getting carried away—”

“What?” Mr. Malfoy’s eyes bugged out. The tea he’d been pouring spilled everywhere; he didn’t seem to notice even though a lot of it splashed on his robes.

With some assistance from Harry and Draco, Mrs. Malfoy explained what had happened in the woods. When they had finished their story, Mr. Malfoy sank back into his chair and scrubbed his hands over his face.

“Merlin,” he said, apparently too upset to swear. “Well that was nearly a disaster. Thank goodness Potter was—well, that you were both together, and that your mother came along when she did. That could have been…” He shook his head, swallowed hard, and did not elaborate. “And no one has any idea who conjured it?”

Mrs. Malfoy shook her head grimly. “No one,” she said.

Mr. Malfoy grimaced. “That’s…worrisome,” he said. It sounded like an understatement to Harry. From the looks on Mr. and Mrs. Malfoy’s faces, they knew it.

There was silence for a moment. Then Harry asked, “What was it all about? Was the Mark connected to the people in masks? Why were they levitating Muggles? What was the point of that?”

The Malfoys exchanged a look, probably deciding how much of the truth to share with the children. Harry felt resentment flare inside him; he hated the way adults kept secrets and said it was for your own good. Carefully Mr. Malfoy said, “The people in masks, I think they were Death Eaters. What’s left of the Dark Lord’s old supporters, anyway; most of his Death Eaters are in Azkaban, of course. But a few managed to avoid imprisonment, and no doubt they thought that, since they were having a jolly evening with the Cup and everything, they’d go on a bit of a nostalgia kick. Pull out the old masks, give some Muggles a bit of a dance.”

“A nice little reunion,” Mrs. Malfoy said drily.

“So did one of them conjure the Dark Mark, then?”

“No,” Mr. Malfoy said, so quickly that Harry leaned back in his chair, startled.

“But—if that was You-Know-Who’s sign, and they were You-Know-Who’s supporters…?”

Draco’s parents shared another one of those unfathomable, infuriating adult glances. “Well,” Mrs. Malfoy said slowly, “those Death Eaters who managed to keep themselves out of Azkaban, they would have had to…disavow the Dark Lord in order to convince the Ministry they hadn’t meant any of the things they’d done, wouldn’t they? Say that they had been forced to do it, wrongly accused, not responsible…pretend they’d never really been involved with him at all. Not the sort of things that the Dark Lord would be pleased to hear about, if he was still around.”

“So whoever conjured the Dark Mark,” Draco said, frowning, “did they do it in some misguided show of support for y—for the Death Eaters, or as a threat?”

“An excellent question,” said Mr. Malfoy. “Of course, whoever cast it would have to have been a Death Eater themselves; the Dark Lord never taught the spell to anyone who wasn’t part of his inner circle. So ostensibly, that would mean they, too, must have distanced themselves from him in order to escape imprisonment…and thus, should be no more devoted than any of the rest of—of _them_ , to their old master.”

For a while nobody spoke. Then Mrs. Malfoy shot to her feet. “These are terribly bleak questions for such a wretched hour of the night,” she declared. “There’s no sense dwelling on it now. To bed, all of you, and try to sleep as late as you can. There will be a terrible rush to the portkeys in the morning I’m sure, so we might as well wait to depart until the crowds have dispersed.”

“Do you think that’s a good idea?” Mr. Malfoy asked. “Waiting? You don’t want to get home at once?”

Mrs. Malfoy shook her head. “I’m sure we don’t have any reason to be afraid of anything now,” she said firmly. “Now get some sleep, darlings.”

Harry wondered who she was trying to convince: them or herself.

None of them argued, although none of them looked happy either. Harry trudged up the ironwork staircase and climbed into bed with his head buzzing. He knew he ought to feel exhausted: It was nearly three in the morning, but he felt wide-awake—wide-awake, and worried.

Three days ago—it felt like much longer, but it had only been three days—he had awoken with his scar burning. And tonight, for the first time in thirteen years, Lord Voldemort’s mark had appeared in the sky. What did these things mean? Should he tell the Malfoys about his scar, or would that only worry them more?

He thought of the letter he had written to Sirius before leaving Privet Drive. Would Sirius have gotten it yet? When would he reply? Harry lay looking up at the silk ceiling, but no flying fantasies came to him now to ease him to sleep, and it was a long time before he finally dozed off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to thank everyone for reading so far, and to apologize for the delay in getting this chapter posted. Unfortunately there will probably be more delays like that in the near future; I work retail, so that means "'tis the season" to be extra busy these next two months, so I probably won't be able to get new updates posted as promptly as I was doing to start with. We should be back on track in January, though!
> 
> In the meantime, speaking of the winter holidays and commercial consumerism...if anyone would like to help support this story (or at least the author, as she works on the fifth volume!) I'd like to encourage all of you to take a look at [my published original fiction](https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/14824044.Nicky_Kyle) and consider whether it looks like something that might make a good gift to yourself or any of your friends. There's still magic in there, albeit of a different sort than that found in _Harry Potter_ \-- and even some dragons! Because who doesn't love reading about dragons?


	7. Malfoy Manor

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains a few short excerpts from a much earlier _Harry Potter_ book: _The Chamber of Secrets_ , Chapter Four, as well as similarly brief quotations lifted from _Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows_ , Chapters One and Twenty-Three. Aside from those minor scene-setting details and descriptors the content of this chapter is wholly original and not drawn from canon sources, although it does serve to mirror the events of Chapter Ten of _Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire_ and takes place across the same period of time.

Harry slept late the next morning; by the time he woke, all three Malfoys were already sitting around the table in the front room, fully dressed. As Harry came downstairs he heard Draco asking, “—coming back would be a _good_ thing?”

“Of course!” Mr. Malfoy said a little too quickly. “Of course it would be.” There was a muffled thump as though someone had just kicked someone else under the table. “But that’s obviously not what happened. It couldn’t be. That was just someone’s very bad idea of a joke.”

“What,” Harry asked, “you mean levitating those Muggles?”

The Malfoys turned to face him. They looked surprised and Mr. Malfoy even looked a little hurt. “I thought that was rather a good joke, myself,” he said petulantly. “You really don’t think so? I mean, after what Draco tells us you did to that Muggle aunt of yours…?”

Harry shrugged. Watching Aunt Marge bounce along the ceiling like a giant balloon _had_ been pretty good, although he’d been too angry to laugh about it at the time. But what those masked wizards—the Death Eaters—had done to the Roberts family wasn’t the same thing at all, he told himself. Aunt Marge had deserved what she got. Of course, he didn’t know the Robertses, maybe they were horrible people too….

“I guess so,” he said dubiously.

There was silence for a moment, then Mrs. Malfoy said solicitously, “Did you sleep all right? No bad dreams?”

For a moment Harry felt guilty and couldn’t figure out why; then he remembered the dream he had had three days ago about He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, and his scar hurting, and his decision not to tell anybody but Sirius. He reassured himself that Mrs. Malfoy was just asking because last night had been so strange and said, “No, I slept great, thanks.”

She nodded. “Lavender,” she said, as though that explained everything, and bustled-off to tell the house-elf to prepare breakfast. Harry gave another guilty start when the little creature trotted out with their eggs; he couldn’t help but think of the sobbing elf from last night.

“What’s going to happen to Winky?” he asked as they sat down to a hearty spread of three different kinds of eggs, croissants stuffed with fruit, potatoes _dauphinoise_ , french toast slathered with mascarpone, and piles of fresh fruit and cream. Harry filled his plate, suddenly ravenous.

“Winky?” Draco said.

“You know, Winky, the house-elf. From last night? The one that belongs to Mr. Crouch?”

“I expect he’ll free her,” Draco said, shrugging.

The Malfoys’ house-elf—Harry realized suddenly that he couldn’t remember its name, and felt like a heel—gave a little squeak of dismay and rushed out of the room.

“Can’t imagine what else he’d do with a house-elf like that.” Mr. Malfoy shook his head and called his elf back to bring him more tea.

They packed the tent with a single quick spell after shooing the peacocks back inside. Harry winced and imagined the birds, and the house-elf whose name he didn’t know, being folded-up inside the tiny bag with all the tent poles and silk. He told himself that the spell couldn’t possibly work like that, that the interior of the tent was enchanted anyway and probably maintained its shape no matter how much the tent was folded, and then tried not to think about it again.

The campsite around them was almost empty, most of the other tents having either been packed-up already or burned away in the riot. Harry gaped at the destruction around him; it was less than he had expected, after all the commotion last night, but when he saw tired Ministry wizards walking through the detritus with their wands out, making rubbish vanish, he realized that the clean-up had already begun.

They heard urgent voices as they approached the spot where the Portkeys lay, and when they reached it, they found a great number of witches and wizards gathered around an unfamiliar wizard; Harry guessed that he was in charge of the Portkeys for this shift. Despite the Malfoys waiting until after ten to leave in order to let most of the other campers clear-out first, there was still a lengthy queue. Mr. Malfoy found somebody who looked official—or would have looked official, if she hadn’t been wearing a child’s beanie on her head and a painter’s smock over her blue robes—and Harry saw the glitter of gold change hands.

They were ushered to the front of the queue and were able to take a broken umbrella back to Walbury Hill. There were still a few pockets of mist in the lower, shady patches of ground and the sun was much dimmer than it had been the first time Harry had come here, but otherwise the place was unchanged: lots of grass, scrubby plants, and some distant ruins. Harry wondered how far they would have to walk to get to the Malfoys’ home.

He followed the others down a long country lane. After about twenty minutes they turned off onto a side path that, while just as smooth as the other, looked like it got much less traffic. At the end of the lane loomed a tall house—although “house” was an inadequate word for such a structure; it was more of an estate, he could tell, although most of it was still hidden behind a high hedge. At the end of the lane was a pair of wrought-iron gates. Mr. Malfoy strode up to them and tapped them with his wand and they swung open silently.

“Here we are, Potter!” Mr. Malfoy said cheerfully and led the way up a long drive between high yew hedges. “Malfoy Manor. Home to our family for ten centuries. Welcome!”

Harry followed in silence, awed. The house, when it came into view at the end of the curving drive, was even more impressive than his glimpse from the road had suggested. Harry wasn’t sure how many stories it was; the sun glinting off the diamond-paned windows made his eyes water and blur. The hedge opened up into sprawling, elaborate gardens. He could hear at least one fountain and looked up to see a white peacock that had not been with them at the match picking its way daintily across the yard. Harry wouldn’t have been surprised to find an elaborate hedge maze back there somewhere.

Trying—and probably failing—not to gape, Harry followed the Malfoys up broad stone steps into a hallway lined with portraits. He saw a lot of pale-faced people with haughty expressions; most of them had strong noses and blonde hair. They were dotted here and there with a few different faces—rich brown skin, bright red curls, one or two plump brunettes—but Harry quickly got the impression that the Malfoys had inherited a very specific look and style from their ancestors in addition to this handsome manor home.

At the end of the hallway a house-elf appeared, bowing and cringing, to take the Malfoys’ meager baggage. “Make sure you let the peacocks out in the garden by their roost,” Mr. Malfoy ordered the elf.

“Yes, master,” the elf said. It looked up, saw Harry, gave a little squeak of terror, and vanished with a CRACK.

Harry stared, bewildered; had that been _Dobby?_

“Want a tour?” Draco offered, his grey eyes glittering. “House or gardens first?”

“Um…house,” said Harry. He followed Draco, but kept peeking over his shoulder for a glimpse of the familiar-looking house-elf. He told himself he must have been imagining things; he had only seen three house-elves before in his life and they had all looked very similar. This one probably looked a lot _like_ Dobby; it couldn’t possibly be him.

The thought distracted Harry throughout the tour. He wasn’t sure how to ask Draco about it. “Hey, do you remember that house-elf that was trying to kill me our second year? He wouldn’t happen to have belonged to _you_ , would he? Oh, he does? Well, any idea why he was trying to murder me, then?”

There was no good way to start that conversation, so Harry kept silent and tried to pay attention as Draco led him through the many rooms of his enormous home.

The drawing room off the front entrance was dazzling. It was a wide room with an ornate marble fireplace. The chairs sitting in front of it that had the same look as those in the Slytherin common room: old, fancy, and probably more comfortable than they looked. A crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling, more portraits against the dark purple walls.

The library was nothing compared to that of Hogwarts of course, but it was the largest library that Harry had ever seen inside a house and some of the books on the taller shelves looked every bit as old and interesting as anything in the Hogwarts Restricted Section.

The ballroom—and there was an actual _ballroom_ , right inside their home!—was almost as large as the Great Hall at Hogwarts and the walls were lined with huge windows that opened out onto the gardens. Three enormous chandeliers glittered overhead, their crystal facets reflecting the light from outside all along the walls and floor in dazzling patterns. Harry tried to imagine what the room would look like with the chandeliers lit and the marble floor full of people in fancy clothing, music rising from the harpsichord in the corner, and gave up.

There was even a fully-appointed potions lab, its shelves stuffed with neatly-labeled bottles and jars and boxes. It was as immaculately clean as the rest of the house but the tools and equipment on the long table looked well-used, chosen for practicality rather than fashion, unlike most everything else in the house. Looking around at the room, Harry thought he had the answer for why Draco always did so much better than him in Potions Class.

The owlery was both smaller and cleaner than the one at Hogwarts and had perches for at least two dozen birds, although only three were filled right now. Harry recognized Bowman, Draco’s miniature eagle owl, as well as the one that had delivered his invitation to the Dursleys, but there was no sign of Hedwig’s white feathers. Harry sighed and followed Draco back into the main part of the house.

Everywhere there were framed photographs of Draco as a child. In the youngest ones he was wearing his hair in curls that passed his shoulders, sometimes tied back with thick ribbons, and many of his robes sported so many ruffles that he looked more like a layered cake than a child. Harry bit his lip to keep from laughing and tried to peek at as many of the moving photos as he could without Draco catching him.

By the time they’d finished the second floor, Harry’s head was spinning too much from trying to keep all the rooms and hallways straight for him to waste any more time thinking about house-elves. When Draco showed him the suite of three rooms that made up his personal chambers he couldn’t even manage to be surprised. Aside from the moving Quidditch posters framed along one wall, they were decorated like something out of a museum or a historical drama on the telly, not like an ordinary adolescent boy’s room, but Draco somehow looked at home amidst the ostentatious furnishings and blue velvet curtains. The four-poster bed in the main chamber could have slept a hippogriff and the couches in the other rooms looked plush enough that they could have doubled as beds themselves. Most people made do with a single bedroom, but not Draco; he even had his own personal bathroom with a tub so large that both Crabbe and Goyle could have fit into the marble basin with room to spare. There were four different faucets; Harry didn’t dare ask what they did for fear of what Draco would tell him. One was probably dedicated solely to bubbles, he thought, and had to hide a smirk.

The smirk turned into open-mouthed gaping when Draco showed Harry the guest suit where he would be sleeping. He had assumed he would be bunking with Draco—surely the Malfoys owned whatever the wizarding equivalent of an air mattress was, and there was enough room for a whole Quidditch team to set up camp in Draco’s bedroom—but instead he would have his own two-roomed suite with an attached bath almost as luxurious as the one in Draco’s rooms. His luggage had already been brought up and Harry stared at his battered school trunk and Hedwig’s empty cage, suddenly feeling shabby. He looked around for his broom but was unsurprised not to see it; probably the Malfoys had a special closet just for brooms somewhere and Harry’s Firebolt was already tucked safely inside.

The heavy green curtains had been pulled to let in the light. Harry wandered to the window and stared out at the sprawling garden below rather than look at the room any longer. He felt suddenly in need of a bath and wondered belatedly if he had remembered to wipe his feet before coming inside. He had always known that Draco was rich of course, but this house was something else altogether.

“Well?” Draco asked, his voice nervous. “Do you like it? I told mother you’d probably like this one, but it’s all right if you don’t. There are other rooms, if you want to see them and then decide which you like best—?”

Harry shook his head. “It’s perfect,” he said. “Thanks. It’s just…big.”

Draco’s nose wrinkled. “A lot bigger than that hole the Muggles had you stuck in, anyway,” he said. “I can’t believe they treat you like that.”

Harry shrugged. “It’s better than the cupboard under the stairs they used to keep me in,” he said without thinking.

Draco’s eyes widened. “Better than _what?_ ” he gasped.

“Never mind,” Harry said quickly. “You know Muggles are weird. Can we see the garden?”

Draco’s nod was hesitant but he led the way back down the stairs and out through a side door. Draco pointed-out the broom shed next to it. “Your Firebolt should be in there by now, I expect,” he said. Harry, thinking that he’d never seen anything with a door that fancy called a “shed,” just nodded.

Harry wasn’t very interested in gardening, but even he knew enough to tell that he was looking at grounds that were immaculately planted and carefully maintained. He wondered if house-elves were responsible for the gardening or if there were wizard landscapers. The stark combination of white marble statuary with dark green foliage was strangely relaxing. Butterflies, bees, and birds of all sorts flocked around the flowers and trees. From somewhere in the hedge, a peacock shrieked, making Harry jump. Another walked around the corner of a path with its tail feathers flared. Next to them, the starlings swimming in the top basin of the fountain were incongruous in their ordinariness.

Then they turned a corner of the hedge and Harry stopped dead, staring at the smooth grass and tall hoops before him. It was half the size of the pitch at Hogwarts, maybe a little smaller yet, but it was still the most beautiful thing Harry had seen in the whole estate. “You have your own _Quidditch pitch?”_ he gasped.

Draco grinned. “Want to go flying?” he said.

Harry raced him back to the broom shed.

 

By the time they were done flying, Harry really did need a bath. They returned their brooms to the shed (Harry was still having a hard time associating that word with the Malfoys’ broomstick storage room; it not only had polished display stands for every broom, it had a counter with a full complement of broomstick servicing tools and carpets plush enough to swallow sickles) and trooped upstairs.

Harry paused as they passed the drawing room. The door was open and Mr. and Mrs. Malfoy were bent over what looked like a copy of the _Daily Prophet_ , their pale heads close together and their expressions worried. Harry lingered in the doorway for a minute, straining his ears. He heard Mrs. Malfoy say, “No I expect that’s just Rita being Rita, darling. The only body that was going to be found in those woods was Amos Diggory’s if he accused my son of one—more— _thing!”_

Mr. Malfoy chuckled and kissed her cheek.

Harry hurried to catch up with Draco before anyone noticed him eavesdropping.

After a long, luxurious bath in a tub full of bubbles, Harry felt refreshed enough that he could have flown another five rounds. Instead he joined the Malfoys for lunch in the summer sun room. The meal spread out in front of them was even more extravagant than what they had eaten at the Quidditch World Cup, despite Mrs. Malfoy’s distracted apology about it being, “Just something light and simple for the afternoon.” Harry discovered that he really liked salmon with pickled carrots and set about filling his plate with seconds and thirds.

The conversation around the table was less satisfying. Harry and Draco were happy to discuss the World Cup match again—Draco had come to the conclusion that Krum had let his team down by “giving up too early” instead of waiting to see if they would be able to catch-up to Ireland’s lead, while Harry insisted that Krum had made the right call, and they argued cheerfully for several minutes—but Mr. and Mrs. Malfoy were distracted and needed things repeated whenever they were asked a question. Harry would have been content to leave them to their concerns, but Draco kept trying to get his father to confirm a point he was trying to make or his mother to provide the evidence to an argument that he had forgotten, forcing their sporadic attention.

Eventually Harry gave up on drawing the adults into a conversation about the match and said, “So has the Ministry found anything else out? About who conjured the Dark Mark?”

He regretted the question as soon as it was asked. Mrs. Malfoy flinched and dropped her spoon, splattering pâté across her plate. Mr. Malfoy’s face went white and he put his delicate glass goblet down so hard it cracked. “Not that they have seen fit to share with us,” he said icily.

Harry swallowed. “Okay,” he said apologetically, “I was just wondering. Thanks.”

Now that the subject had been brought up, it would not be so easily dismissed. _“Could_ it have been that house-elf?” Draco asked.

Both of his parents shook their head emphatically.

“Impossible,” said Mrs. Malfoy.

“Not likely,” said Mr. Malfoy. “It’s a complex spell. Even if you got the delusional idea to try and teach wand-magic to an elf, they’d never be able to do something like that. Don’t have the brains for it.”

Harry winced and darted a glance at the house-elf quietly swapping out their dinner plates for desert, but none of the other three seemed to notice it was there. The elf’s tiny face was expressionless.

“I bet it was Mr. Crouch himself,” Draco said, warming up to the topic. “Or maybe Mr. Diggory. He seemed like the type to do something nasty just so he could pin it on someone else.”

Mr. Malfoy snorted. “Amos Diggory, try and conjure the Dark Mark? That I’d pay to see.”

His wife shushed him. “This is hardly appropriate mealtime conversation,” she scolded.

“Mother,” said Draco, rolling his eyes in protest, “lighten up.”

Mrs. Malfoy raised her eyebrows at him. “We have a guest with us, Draco. Mind your manners.”

Harry expected Draco to scoff, to tell her that someone he shared a dormitory and a dinner table with at school didn’t count as a _real_ guest, but instead he nodded and mumbled something apologetic around his mouthful of mulberry tart.

Mrs. Malfoy nodded regally and turned back to her own desert but Mr. Malfoy put his fork down with a frown. “I hope that little fracas won’t turn the international community skittish,” he said.

“Who cares?” asked Draco. Harry wouldn’t have said it quite like that, but he agreed; did it matter if wizards and witches in other countries felt jumpy? It wasn’t like they could take the Cup away from Ireland now…

Mr. Malfoy raised an eyebrow at his son. “You might,” he said drily, “if the skittishness spreads to Durmstrang and Beauxbatons.”

Harry didn’t see why they should care what other wizarding schools were doing, but Draco gasped with sudden understanding. “You don’t think they’d change their mind, do you?” he asked, sounding worried.

Mr. and Mrs. Malfoy exchanged a glance, then Mrs. Malfoy said, “It’s unlikely at this juncture. There’s been so much work put into it already, pulling out now would be a bit silly.”

“Besides,” Mr. Malfoy added bracingly, “as long as nobody’s trouble spills too far outside their borders and the Muggles don’t catch wind of it, everyone knows better than to poke their noses into someone else’s business. None of them came sniffing around during the war; they’re not going to get up in arms over a little bit of high spirits at a sporting match.”

Harry wouldn’t have classified the riot at the Quidditch World Cup as “high spirits,” but he was more concerned with what the Malfoys were talking about than with the verbiage they used. “Change their mind about what?” he asked. “What have Durmstrang and Beauxbatons got to do with anything?”

Mrs. Malfoy looked startled. “Good heavens, hasn’t Draco told you yet?” she said.

Draco hunched one shoulder sheepishly. “Didn’t really have a chance to,” he muttered. “With the World Cup and everything…that was more important….”

“Of course, dear,” Mrs. Malfoy said soothingly. Harry looked at her expectantly but it was Mr. Malfoy who said, “It’s the Triwizard Tournament, boy. They’ve brought it back.”

Harry stared blankly. “The what?” he asked.

All three Malfoys laughed at him.

“The poor boy,” Mrs. Malfoy murmured, “ostracized by his mother’s filthy Muggles…”

“It’s a big competition between schools,” Draco told him. “They used to have it ages and ages ago—Hogwarts, Durmstrang, and Beauxbatons. They’re the top three schools for magic in the world,” he added in an off-hand way that told Harry that he had been expected to know that already.

“It used to be held every five years,” Mr. Malfoy added, “but they did away with it—oh, around the beginning of the 1800s, I think?”

Mrs. Malfoy nodded. “1792,” she said at once. Harry was reminded of Hermione’s habit of remembering minor facts that nobody else cared about. “There was a problem with a…cockatrice, I think. Maybe a Manticore. Anyway, it was apparently the last straw, and the tournament hasn’t been held since.”

Both Draco and Mr. Malfoy were nodding absently, as though used to Mrs. Malfoy casually impersonating an encyclopedia. “Right,” Mr. Malfoy said, “well anyway—they’ve managed to talk all three schools into agreeing to start it up again this year.” He smiled. “Hogwarts is going to be hosting.”

“And—and we compete in it?” Harry asked.

“Someone does,” said Mrs. Malfoy. Her brow furrowed but she was looking at Draco, not at Harry. “Each school chooses one champion, who represents their best. Supposedly they’ve put added safety precautions in place this year….”

“Mother fusses,” Draco leaned over and told Harry in a carrying whisper. Harry nodded and avoided catching Mrs. Malfoy’s eye. He was sure that she must have heard Draco, but she didn’t say anything.

Harry, struck by sudden curiosity about what it must be like to have somebody around to fuss over you, didn’t say anything either.

 

That night Harry spent a long time standing at the window of his guest room and staring out over the gardens, straining for a glimpse of white feathers or the sound of a distant, friendly _hoot_. When he finally fell asleep he dreamed of snowy owls that turned into beautiful women that turned into fearsome, winged creatures that threw fire and tried to bite his face off.

He woke up sweating in the pale hours before dawn and rolled over, unable to keep the dream he had had three days ago to himself any more—but instead of being in the bed next to him, Draco was asleep in his own room down the hall. Before Harry could make up his mind whether or not to walk over and wake him, he fell asleep again.

When he woke up four hours later he had forgotten both the dream and the desire to speak.

That afternoon Mr. Malfoy took them in to Diagon Alley to purchase Harry’s school supplies. Draco had gotten all of his earlier in the summer but he insisted on coming along to help. Harry, who found Mr. Malfoy almost as intimidating as he was gregarious, was glad they weren’t going alone.

Their first stop was at Gringotts Wizarding Bank so Harry could get more gold from his vault. He hadn’t spent everything he had withdrawn last year, but he knew he didn’t have enough to purchase everything on the list of school supplies that Hogwarts had sent out, especially not when he saw the addition of an unexpected item:

“Dress robes?” he asked, staring. “What do we need dress robes for?”

“Triwizard Tournament, I bet,” Draco said. “We’ll want to show-off for the other schools, won’t we? I bet they’ll have set-up some fancy welcoming banquet, or maybe a victory celebration for afterward. Whatever it is, we’ll want to look our best.” He smoothed his hair back in a gesture that Harry privately thought made him look a bit like a prat: a stiff imitation of his father’s more casual habit of tossing his hair out of his eyes. Harry, thinking of his own impossible-to-manage hair and how stupid he would look trying to do that, decided to say nothing about Draco’s preening.

Arriving at Gringotts in the company of Mr. Malfoy was very different from when Harry had come there on his own last summer, or two years before that with Hagrid: the moment the goblins inside recognized Mr. Malfoy, two of them came hurrying forward, sour smiles on their pointed faces, dipping little bows. They were ushered past the queue and straight to the carts, which at least operated as Harry remembered: whizzing along so fast that he was left breathless, each hairpin turn making him grab at his glasses for fear that they might slip off his face. Mr. Malfoy sat impassively in the back of the cart but Draco, sitting next to Harry, was starting to look slightly green by the time they made it back out into the daylight.

It was a simple matter to get the books that Harry needed, but Draco and his father couldn’t agree about which apothecary to visit in order to buy the best potioneering ingredients, so in the end they went to three different ones. Harry obediently followed their instructions about which type of things to buy at each—he had had no idea that the quality of beetle eyes or lionfish spines could vary so much—and eventually they were both satisfied enough with his purchases that they could break for sundaes at Fortescue’s Ice-Cream Parlour.

Florean Fortescue remembered Harry from the previous summer, when he had spent three weeks in Diagon Alley eating sundaes and listening to Fortescue’s stories about medieval witch burning. He greeted Harry like an old friend, pumping his hand and asking about his History of Magic grades, with only a perfunctory salutation to the Malfoys—quite the opposite of how they had been greeted in Gringotts. Harry expected Draco to sulk at being overlooked but oddly, he didn’t seem to mind.

Harry was halfway through his usual strawberry and peanut butter sundae before he realized that both Draco and his father were making a point of being seen with him: waving to friends as they passed, talking a little too loudly, repeating Harry’s name too many times. He hid a smirk behind a spoonful of whipped cream and pretended that he hadn’t noticed.

Mr. Malfoy pulled a pocket watch out of his robes as Harry was scraping up his last spoonful of half-melted ice cream. “We’ve got a bit of time yet before your fitting, Harry,” he said. “How would the two of you like to accompany me on an errand?” He caught Draco’s eye and added quietly, “Not anything important enough to worry your mother with.”

Draco’s eyes lit up. “We’d love to,” he said, kicking Harry in the ankle as though to forestall a protest.

Harry didn’t have any reason to argue, though. “Sure,” he said, dropping his spoon back into his near-sparkling bowl. “Where are we going?”

“Just a little shop around the corner,” Mr. Malfoy said. A strange smile played across his lips and Harry, for some reason, shivered despite the sticky August weather.

Mr. Malfoy led them onto another street around a corner that Harry had not noticed in his previous explorations of Diagon Alley. This was a much narrower, less crowded street; the shops lining it plain in comparison to the gaudy signs and merchandise that marked most of the ones in Diagon Alley. It took Harry a moment to realize that most of these shops seemed to be devoted to the Dark Arts. He stared around, curious and excited, and when Draco saw him gaping he grinned and said, “Knockturn Alley. Some of the most _interesting_ shops are here.”

Harry, overwhelmed by the sights, said nothing; he was too busy staring.

Mr. Malfoy led them toward what looked like the largest shop on the street. The sign over its door claimed it was “Borgin and Burkes,” but it didn’t say what kind of things it sold. Harry looked around. The shop on the other side of the narrow street had a nasty window display of shrunken heads and, two doors down, a large cage was alive with gigantic black spiders. Next to Borgin and Burkes a sign advertised poisonous candles and, next to that, another offered “Reclaimed and Resurrected Tomes of Lost Lore.” A long-nosed woman, who was wrapped in several cloaks despite the heat, scurried past, giving the three of them a wary look.

“Don’t touch anything in here,” Mr. Malfoy cautioned, and pushed open the door to Borgin and Burkes.

A bell clanged as they entered and Harry hurried in behind the Malfoys, both afraid of being left behind in that dingy street and eager to see what lay inside.

It was much dimmer inside than it had been out in the daylight and Harry blinked several times while his eyes adjusted—then his mouth fell open in wonder.

A glass case nearby held a withered hand on a cushion, a bloodstained pack of cards, and a staring glass eye. Evil-looking masks stared down from the walls, an assortment of human bones lay upon the counter, and rusty, spiked instruments hung from the ceiling. There was a large black cabinet in the back corner next to a stone fireplace. Harry wondered what it held and started to walk toward it, transfixed, when suddenly a stooping man appeared behind the counter, smoothing his greasy hair back from his face.

“Mr. Malfoy, what a pleasure to see you again,” the shopkeeper said in a voice as oily as his hair. “Delighted—and young Master Malfoy, too—charmed. And this must be—” His eyes bulged as he caught sight of Harry’s scar and his unctuous mannerism dropped. “Not— _Harry Potter?_ ” he gasped, and jerked around to stare at Mr. Malfoy as if hoping to be told that this was all some horrible joke.

Mr. Malfoy was smiling coldly. “Afternoon, Borgin,” he drawled. “Yes, of course it is. Harry’s a friend of my son’s from school, he’s been staying with us over the summer.”

Mr. Borgin turned back to Harry, eyeing him as though he were a particularly venomous insect. “I see,” was all he said.

Harry shifted uncomfortably and stared back, wishing Mr. Borgin would look at something else. Draco had already wandered away to examine the merchandise on the nearest shelf—a row of skulls and a skeletal hand wearing three heavy rings. “Can I have one of those?” he asked, pointing.

“No,” his father said without turning around. “If it’s on something that’s dead, Draco, you probably don’t want to put it on.”

“That’s good advice, boy, you should listen to your father,” Mr. Borgin chortled, but Draco scowled and muttered about not meaning to wear the ring _himself_.

Harry took the opportunity to edge closer to Draco, away from Mr. Borgin and his gimlet-eyed stare.

“Well, then, and what can I do for you today, sir?” Mr. Borgin asked, his eyes darting back and forth between Harry and Mr. Malfoy. He rubbed his hands together as though not sure what to do with them.

Mr. Malfoy stepped closer to the counter and dropped his voice to a low murmur. Harry might have wandered closer to listen but Draco was pointing to the withered hand on its cushion and waving for Harry to come and look. “Hand of Glory,” he explained. “If you shove a candle in, only the person holding the hand can see its light. Pretty nifty, right?”

“Do you have one of those?” Harry asked.

“No.” Draco shot a sulky glare at his father’s back. “Father says I haven’t any need for one.”

Harry, who couldn’t remember ever hearing that there was anything that the Malfoys wouldn’t buy for their son when he asked, gave the hand a closer look.

Draco moved off down the glass case, pointing out and explaining other things to Harry; apparently he had been in the shop several times before with one or both of his parents, and he was familiar with much of the usual merchandise. Harry was fascinated and repulsed all at the same time; some of the items were horrifying, but he couldn’t look away. He hadn’t thought that there was anywhere on earth more fascinating than Diagon Alley, but this dingy little sister side-street was giving it a run for its money.

“Look at this one,” Draco crowed, drawing Harry’s attention to a magnificent opal necklace. A card propped against it read, _Caution: Do Not Touch. Cursed – Has Claimed the Lives of Nineteen Muggle Owners to Date._ “What do you think,” Draco asked in an overly-innocent voice, “want to get your aunt a present? I bet she’d love it.”

Their laughter was interrupted by Mr. Malfoy calling, “Right boys, we’re all done here. Come along.”

Mr. Borgin bowed them out of the store, smiling in a way that made Harry’s skin crawl, and in only a few minutes they were back in Diagon Alley. Harry felt a little shell-shocked, then a little resentful. He had spent three weeks in Diagon Alley all by himself last year; why had no one told him that just around the corner was yet another street full of magical shops he could have explored? He wondered what other secrets Diagon Alley might hold, and how he could go about finding them out. His first thought— _ask Hermione_ —was useless; unless someone had written a book called _Diagon Alley, A History,_ that would do him no good. Hermione’s parents were Muggles and she had grown-up with as little contact with the magical world as Harry himself.

He resolved to keep his eyes open as he followed Mr. Malfoy and Draco to Madam Malkin’s Robes for All Occasions and ended up looking around so intently that he fell several feet behind and had to run to catch up. Draco was a few inches taller than Harry and Mr. Malfoy was one of the tallest men Harry knew (aside from Hagrid, of course, who towered over everyone else by several feet) so when he pushed his way through the door of the robes shop, he was panting slightly from the effort.

It was a small shop, but packed with half-finished robes and rolls of fabric in every color, pattern, and texture that Harry could imagine. He had gotten his first Hogwarts robes here—and, he remembered suddenly, this was where he had met Draco for the first time, although they hadn’t known each other’s names then. A rather stupid smile spread across Harry’s face when he thought about how much his life had changed since Hagrid had first walked him through those magical bricks into Diagon Alley and his first glimpse of the Wizarding World.

Mr. Malfoy cleared his throat and a squat, smiling witch wearing cherry-red robes bustled out with a tape measure in one hand and a wand in the other.

“Here for some dress robes, are you?” Madam Malkin asked, sounding slightly harried. “Well, I’m afraid you’ll have a bit of a wait, we’re full-up on—oh, Mr. Malfoy, yes of course, you have an appointment, right this way. Now, what was wrong with young Master Malfoy’s robes?”

“Draco’s robes are fine as they are,” Mr. Malfoy drawled. “This appointment is for Mr. Potter. Harry Potter. He’s staying with us for the summer, and needs some dress robes before the boys go back to Hogwarts.” He glanced briefly at Harry and added, “And I suppose a few new regular robes as well, right Harry?”

“Er,” said Harry, who hadn’t thought to try-on his school robes and see whether or not they still fit.

“Might as well,” Mr. Malfoy said, waving the question as way. “While you’re here, yes?”

“Er,” said Harry again, “right. Good idea.”

He let himself be swept away by Madam Malkin, who turned him over to a purple-haired assistant in bright orange robes that somehow did not clash with his curls.

Harry found himself up on a stool in the cramped aisles between the racks of robes and bolts of cloth, staring at himself in a mirror while the purple-haired wizard held up first one color of fabric and then another. “Trying to find the one that will make you sparkle, dear, you know.”

Harry didn’t know but he nodded along and let the wizard work. Draco got bored with looking out the window and wandered over to help, offering commentary on the man’s color choices and cut propositions.

“No, not too dark,” Draco complained, “you’ll wash him out. You need something brighter with coloring like his, try the teal again.”

“Flared shoulders are very ‘in’ right now, and with his hair—”

“Well he’s probably going to need to _see_ at some point while he’s wearing them, so the glasses will have to stay.”

“Maybe some jet buttons up the front…”

“Oh that’s good, that almost matches his eyes….”

“A little edging maybe, to spice it up. Maybe some black piping…?”

Harry had no idea what either of them were talking about so he left them to it. All he had to do was grunt whenever they paused to wait for him to make a decision, and then they did what they thought was best, assuming he had agreed. It was tedious, standing there for what felt like hours, being told not to move lest he jar loose some of the pins holding the half-finished robes in place. Knowing that there were other students in the same boat piled in on either side of him helped a little and Harry exchanged strained smiles of commiseration with the boy on the footstool to his left. To his right a whole group of girls were giggling together, all apparently sharing one fitting with two increasingly harried assistants. Harry tried not to look their way because whenever he did, they burst out into gales of laughter that made his cheeks go hot.

When the boy left, his robes finished, Harry stared stolidly straight ahead and tried to ignore the sound of giggling. Draco and the wizard in charge of Harry’s fitting were having an argument somewhere behind him about contrasting weights of cloth and how best to arrange a double dart to get the best draping. Harry tuned it out, grunting whenever he thought one of them was looking at him. He didn’t notice that someone else had come in to take the place of the boy to his left until a soft voice said, “Hi Harry.”

Harry turned and almost fell off his footstool when he recognized Cho Chang, the Ravenclaw Seeker at Hogwarts. She was a short, pretty girl with long black hair and when she smiled at him, Harry’s pinned-up robes suddenly felt too tight across the chest.

“Hi,” he said.

“So…getting your dress robes, yeah?” Cho asked.

Harry nodded. “Yeah. Um. You too?”

It was Cho’s turn to nod. “I like your color,” she said.

Harry looked down at his robes, unable to remember what color Draco and the purple-haired wizard had finally settled on. Bright bottle green blazed back at him. He looked up again. “Er, thanks,” he said. “You too.”

Cho was still wearing the robes she had walked into the shop in, but she didn’t laugh at him. Instead she looked down at her feet and muttered, “Oh, thanks,” while her gold cheeks turned pink.

Harry wished he could slap himself, but he would have jarred loose his pins if he had.

“I mean—” he said, and stopped talking, because he didn’t know what he meant.

“Sure,” said Cho.

Harry looked in the mirror again because he couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t make him sound stupider than he did already, and he felt weird staring at Cho without saying something.

“Have a good summer?” she asked suddenly.

“Yeah,” said Harry, trying to ignore the needles and thread flashing around him as the wizard doing his robes got back to work. “Yeah, thanks. You?”

“Yeah,” said Cho. “Thanks. Um. We went to the Quidditch World Cup. Were you—?”

“Yeah,” said Harry. “Yeah, Draco—his family took me.”

“Oh,” said Cho. “He’s your reserve on the Slytherin team, right? That was nice of him. Them.”

“Yeah,” Harry agreed. He looked around in the mirror but Draco was suddenly, annoyingly nowhere to be found. He ground his teeth and tried to think of something else to say.

“Oh,” Cho said, sounding suddenly so horrified that Harry looked up, thinking that she must have just knocked a whole cushion’s worth of pins onto her feet, but she was standing stock-still and staring wide-eyed into the mirror in front of her. “Oh, of course you were there, I saw you there, oh I’m such an idiot, I wasn’t thinking, I just—”

“No,” said Harry, “no, it’s okay, I barely—we barely saw each other. And it was so busy, and there was tons of people, and the match itself of course—”

“And the riot after,” Cho interrupted and shuddered, which earned her a scolding from the stout witch pinning up her robes. “Sorry,” Cho murmured, then turned her head carefully to look back at Harry. “That was—that was horrible. Did you see any of it?”

Harry nodded. “Yeah,” he started to say, “we were actually right underneath it when the Dark—”

“That’s you all done then, luv,” said the purple-haired wizard. “Down you get, I’ll take those, thank you.” The green robes were pulled off over Harry’s head, jarring his glasses. He scrambled to shove them back onto his nose and before he could speak again the wizard was hustling him toward the front counter.

“See you at school, then,” Cho called after him.

“Yeah,” Harry said back, “yeah I’ll see you—”

But the racks of robes swung closed between them and Harry stumbled against the edge of the counter.

“All done?” Draco looked up from the magazine he was flipping through. “Excellent. Superb choice of robes, too,” he said.

Since Harry had done almost none of the choosing himself he just grunted again and said, “Sure. Thanks for helping.”

Draco waved his gratitude away and waited impatiently while the purple-haired wizard wrapped Harry’s new green dress robes and black uniform robes up together and gave Harry his change. They left the shop together, Harry pausing to crane his neck for a last glimpse of Cho, but all he could see were rows upon rows of colorful robes packed in tight next to each other and a line of impatient parents and bored students stretching away from the shop.

“I guess they’ve got more work than usual, with everyone needing dress robes in addition to their regular uniform robes,” Harry observed.

“Yeah,” Draco agreed distractedly. “Come on, father’s not back yet, let’s go look in Quality Quidditch—”

But just then Mr. Malfoy rounded the corner. Harry, whose heart had quickened at the idea of visiting his favorite store in Diagon Alley, smothered a sigh of regret. To his delight, when Draco told his father where they had been heading, Mr. Malfoy was happy to accompany them to look at broomsticks and Quidditch gear.

The only awkward moment came when Mr. Malfoy told Draco that there was no reason he needed a new broom already and Harry had to pretend to go temporarily deaf so as to avoid having to acknowledge the fact that the only reason Draco wasn’t flying Seeker for Slytherin was because he, Harry, _was_. They made it out of the shop without a row thanks to the timely distraction of a pair of siblings too young for Hogwarts chasing each other through the shop, knocking over an entire stack of Bludgers.

Harry, Draco, and Mr. Malfoy fled the chaos before they could become targets and returned to the manor for another excellent dinner and, much to Harry’s embarrassment, a short fashion show where he had to put on the new dress robes and show them off to Mrs. Malfoy, who clapped and told him he looked very handsome.

Draco laughed at him while Harry’s face burned and he hurried up to his rooms to change.


	8. Aboard the Hogwarts Express

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This section includes excerpts from Chapter Eleven of _Goblet of Fire_ , running from page 158 to 170 in the American hardcover edition as well as a few from Chapter Ten, concerning pages 148 to 150.

The rest of the week passed in a similar mixture of pleasant and awkward moments. Harry and Draco spent a lot of time on the Malfoys’ miniature Quidditch pitch, and Draco’s parents spent a lot of time whispering together and reading the newspaper while looking nervous. Harry could tell that they were still upset by what had happened at the Quidditch World Cup but every time he tried to broach the topic of the Dark Mark and the Death Eaters and the Roberts family, somehow the subject got changed before he had a chance to ask anything important.

Worse, to Harry’s mind, was the fact that he hardly got to talk to Mr. Malfoy about how the case for Sirius’s innocence was going. Whenever he brought up the subject, Mr. Malfoy was encouraging and mentioned seeing Cornelius Fudge recently—but he didn’t have any new details to give Harry. He was in and out of the house a lot, giving Harry hope that he might have better news any day, but whenever Harry asked him about it nothing had changed. Whatever was occupying so much of Mr. Malfoy’s time, it didn’t seem to be progress toward Sirius’s exoneration.

Several times Harry thought about telling the three of them about his dream; he knew that Draco would be intrigued and he hoped that Mr. Malfoy might have some good ideas. Every time he started to speak, though, something stopped him. Sometimes it was the sight of a house-elf slipping past in the background, bringing a tray of food or refilling a goblet. Sometimes it was nothing he could put his finger on, just a feeling that it wasn’t the right time to mention it. Every morning he checked the Malfoys’ owlery and every night he stared out the wide windows of his guest bedroom, hoping for a glimpse of Hedwig and a response from Sirius.

He and Draco also spent a lot of their time talking about the Triwizard Tournament, even though neither of them knew enough about it to have anything meaningful to say.

“You’re definitely going to enter, though?”

“Yes, of course. Aren’t you?”

“Well, yeah,” Harry shrugged, “I mean—why not, right?”

“Exactly.”

There didn’t seem to be much more to say than that, but somehow they managed to repeat the conversation a dozen times without getting bored.

Eventually it was time to go back to Hogwarts. Harry packed his trunk, checked one last time for Hedwig, dressed in one of his new plaid shirts and jeans—they would change into their robes on the train—and found his broomstick already waiting by his luggage before he could go and fetch it from the shed. He hadn’t seen the house-elf that looked like Dobby again—or if he had, then he was paying enough attention now to realize that it was a different one; he still hadn’t learned to tell them apart and he wasn’t sure if the Malfoys had one elf or a dozen working in their house—but he was getting used to the way things got cleaned-up whenever his back was turned. Apparently house-elves took pride in being unobtrusive and the Malfoys’ elves (however many there were of them) were good at their jobs.

Harry wasn’t sure if he was supposed to thank them or not. He settled for muttering, “Er—thanks for everything,” to his apparently empty room before he left. He was pretty sure he imagined the nervous squeak that came from the wardrobe in response.

The Malfoys were already on the veranda when Harry trotted downstairs, Mrs. Malfoy fussing over their luggage. “Let’s at least put a cover over Bowman’s cage so he doesn’t get wet,” she said.

“Mother, it’s hardly even drizzling,” Draco complained, rolling his eyes. “It probably isn’t raining at all in London and anyway, we’ll only be outside for a moment.”

“Nevertheless,” Mrs. Malfoy said firmly, and disappeared back inside.

“We’re going to be late!” Draco shouted after her, but the door had already swung shut.

Harry looked out at the misty, gray skies and sighed. While he was excited to go back to Hogwarts School, this was the first time he had gotten to spend a proper summer holiday at the home of people he liked. He wanted to go back to Hogwarts, of course—but he wouldn’t have minded if there had been another week or two of summer first.

“All packed?” Mr. Malfoy asked cheerfully.

Harry nodded. “Yes, sir. Thanks again for having me. And taking me to the World Cup, and everything with Sirius and all that.”

Mr. Malfoy smiled but he looked more distracted than usual. “Of course, my boy, of course. You’re welcome here anytime.” He focused on Harry long enough to clap him on the shoulder, then turned to finish strapping Hedwig’s empty cage on top of Harry’s trunk.

“You’re sure you’ll be able to manage that, are you?” Mr. Malfoy asked dubiously, eyeing the awkward result.

Harry shrugged. “The cage hardly weighs anything without Hedwig in it,” he said, trying to sound brisk and casual, as though he wasn’t upset by her long absence.

Mr. Malfoy nodded but didn’t look convinced. “Maybe just a bit of assistance,” he murmured, and drew his wand. He flicked it at both Harry’s and Draco’s trunk but Harry didn’t notice anything different until he went to pick up his broomstick and accidentally kicked his trunk. Instead of staying put and bruising Harry’s toes, it skidded forward several inches as though it weighed almost nothing. “Cool!” Harry exclaimed, and grinned. “Thanks!”

Mr. Malfoy winked at him. “Just don’t mention it to anyone from the Ministry,” he said slyly.

Harry chuckled.

Mrs. Malfoy returned with a purple cover that looked like it had been made especially to go over owl cages. Bowman hooted with indignation when she pulled it over the top of the bars but once it was down, he stopped complaining. “There we are,” Mrs. Malfoy said brightly, handing the covered cage to Draco. “All set.”

She frowned and looked closer at her son. “Maybe you should get a hat, darling. You don’t want to have to ride the train wet, do you? Perhaps I should fetch an umbrella….”

“Mother! We are going to be _late!”_

“He’ll be fine, Cissy,” Mr. Malfoy insisted. “The boy’s right, it’s hardly even raining.”

“Oh all right then,” Mrs. Malfoy said unhappily.

“Come along boys, grab hold tightly,” Mr. Malfoy instructed, making sure that Harry and Draco had a hold both of what they were carrying—Harry his trunk, Draco the cage with Bowman in it—and of one of the adults. Mr. Malfoy wrapped his free hand around the handle of Draco’s trunk and then, with that familiar stomach-pulling jerk and tight, clenching pressure, they Apparated.

When they reappeared—in a small, dingy room whose walls were lined with dusty shelves—heavy rain was splattering against the window. The deluge was so thick that Harry had to squint to make out the familiar entrance of King’s Cross Station across the street. An elderly witch with silver dreadlocks ushered them out the door almost at once; turning, Harry saw that they had been inside an old shop that claimed to sell stationary and envelopes.

From the looks of the grimy window and faded sign, it had been several decades since it had been a popular shopping destination, if ever. He wondered if, like the Leaky Cauldron, there was something about the place that made Muggles look away without noticing that it was there, or if the dilapidated state of its window display was enough to hide it in plain sight. He was so busy trying to read the faded name on the sign that he didn’t notice the door opening again until it bumped his shoulder.

A girl Harry recognized vaguely from Hogwarts—Megan Jones, a short black girl who flew on the Hufflepuff Quidditch team—stepped onto the street, followed by two people who had to be her parents. “Sorry,” Megan said, wincing. She gave Harry a terse smile then all three of them ran across the street, Megan with her broom held tight in her arms while her parents carried her trunk between them.

Harry moved away from the door quickly before it could open again.

The Malfoys were huddled together under the awning, peering out at the rain with dismay. Harry was so used to them wearing wizard robes that he didn’t immediately realize that even though they were standing in the middle of a street in London, they hadn’t bothered to put on Muggle clothes before leaving home. They were at least dressed in dark, subdued colors—which was probably as close to “incognito” as they ever got, Harry thought. He hoped it was raining too hard for anyone to notice.

“Why didn’t I bring an umbrella?” Mrs. Malfoy lamented.

“Just cast an Impervious Charm, mother,” Draco said impatiently. “Hurry up, we’re going to miss the train.”

“We can’t use rain-repelling spells in front of the Muggles, darling,” Mrs. Malfoy said. “They would be too noticeable.”

“So?” Draco whined. “Muggles are stupid, they’d never figure out what you’d done.”

“No,” Mr. Malfoy agreed, “but the Ministry always has several agents stationed in plainclothes in there on days when the Hogwarts Express is coming or going, watching for Statute violations and ready to Obliviate any Muggles who see too much.”

“Then we don’t have anything to worry about, right?” said Draco, but both his parents shook their heads.

“Violating the Statute of Secrecy is no minor infraction,” Mr. Malfoy retorted. He glanced at his wife and added quietly, “Perhaps especially not these days. No, I’m afraid we’ll just have to get wet.”

Both Draco and Mrs. Malfoy sighed heavily.

“If only the platform wasn’t always so crowded,” Mrs. Malfoy said. “We could Apparate straight there, but it’s just too risky with so many people, even with your father guiding….”

“Pity there’s no way to just kick the damn Muggles out of town for a day,” Mr. Malfoy said. Draco voiced a hearty agreement. Harry didn’t bother pointing out the impossibility of emptying London for a day, even with magic; just shook his head in admiration at the audacity of the idea.

“Well, waiting won’t make it any drier,” Mrs. Malfoy said briskly, and led the way into the crosswalk. Harry thought about mentioning that dragging trunks that bobbed along at your heels as if they weighed no more than feathers would probably attract at least as much attention as arriving bone-dry in the middle of a rainstorm, but he decided to keep the thought to himself. With their white-blonde hair and long dark robes, the Malfoys already looked about as out-of-place as people could get in the middle of a city as busy and varied as London. Harry wondered if the contrast of his darker complexion and plainer clothes would stand out next to them or if he would be overlooked entirely. Regardless, he was sure that anyone looking at the four of them wasn’t going to waste time staring at their luggage.

Harry was used to getting onto platform nine and three-quarters by now. It was a simple matter of walking straight through the apparently solid barrier dividing platforms nine and ten. The only tricky part was doing this in an unobtrusive way, so as to avoid attracting Muggle attention. The Malfoys didn’t seem to care about that as much as Harry had expected; they walked right up to the barrier without even looking around to see if anyone was watching. Harry flinched and looked over his shoulder but no one appeared to be looking their way. He shut his eyes and hurried through, opening his eyes again on the other side to see platform nine and three-quarters materialize in front of him.

The Hogwarts Express, a gleaming scarlet steam engine, was already there, clouds of steam billowing from it, through which the many Hogwarts students and parents on the platform appeared like dark ghosts. Bowman voiced one loud, hoarse complaint—or maybe it was a challenge—in response to the hooting of the many other owls, then fell silent. Harry and Draco paused at the edge of the platform to say goodbye to Draco’s parents.

“Thanks again for having me,” Harry said fervently. “And taking me to the World Cup. And everything. This was the best summer ever.”

The Malfoys both beamed and Mrs. Malfoy actually leaned over to kiss him on the forehead. “Thank you, dear,” she said. “I’m so glad you were there with us—so glad that Draco has a friend like you.” Harry turned away quickly and used the excuse of loading his mostly-weightless trunk onto the train to hide the furious blush spreading across his cheeks.

Draco didn’t blush, even though he got about a dozen hugs and kisses before his parents let him climb onto the train next to Harry.

“Enjoy yourselves this year,” Mr. Malfoy called, and winked at them. “I expect you’ll have a _champion_ time of it.”

“But be careful!” Mrs. Malfoy cautioned. Her pretty face was drawn in a frown of concern. “Remember what we said about—”

“I remember, mother!” Draco interrupted her. “Stop fussing!”

Mr. Malfoy slung an arm around his wife’s shoulders. “The boy’s right, Cissy. It’s supposed to be much safer now, he’ll be fine!”

Mrs. Malfoy still looked worried. “Just take care, darling. Remember, those Durmstrang students will have all been taught to duel _properly_ , and—”

But at that moment, the whistle blew, and there was a great scramble of students pulling themselves away from their families and on board the train. Harry and Draco were pushed along the corridor away from the door by the sudden rush of bodies. “Come on,” Draco said, “let’s find a compartment.” He led the way down the train car, Harry following. He peered in the windows of the compartments they passed, looking for the familiar sight of their friends Vincent Crabbe and Gregory Goyle. The two of them never had any trouble finding an empty compartment, which meant that he and Draco never had any trouble either.

“Harry, Harry in here! Harry, Draco! Sit here!”

Instead of Crabbe or Goyle, it was Hermione Granger who was waving to them, the face underneath her unruly mane of brown hair looking every bit as pale and worried as Mrs. Malfoy’s had on the platform, although rather less elegant.

Draco turned around to stare back at Harry, his expression equal parts incredulous and horrified. Harry shrugged helplessly and pushed his trunk into the compartment where Hermione was sitting. Draco followed him, but he made no effort to hide the fact that he wasn’t happy about it.

From the horrified expression on his freckled face when they entered, Ron Weasley wasn’t any happier. He was sitting opposite Hermione, staring up at Harry and Draco as they stepped through the door.

“What did you want to call them in here for?” he sputtered.

Hermione rolled her eyes impatiently and grabbed the handle of Harry’s trunk. “Honestly, why do you think? To talk about what happened at the Quidditch World Cup, of course!” She grunted in surprise when her attempt to lift Harry’s trunk into the overhead luggage rack was made easier than it ought to have been by Mr. Malfoy’s weightlessness charm. She frowned at Harry but, for once, sat down without saying anything about his breaking the rules by having magicked luggage.

Harry recognized Hermione’s flat-faced cat, Crookshanks, nestled in a bed of maroon fabric in a corner of the luggage rack. He looked damp and unhappy and liable to savage the first person to come near him. Harry prudently shoved Hedwig’s empty cage into the luggage rack on the other side of the compartment and sat down next to Hermione.

The pistons hissed loudly and the train began to move. Draco shot Harry a murderous glare of betrayal before stowing his trunk and Bowman’s cage in the luggage rack overhead. He took his time removing the purple cover and shoving a few owl treats through the bars, but when he turned around nothing about the compartment’s occupants had changed. He looked between the bench were Harry and Hermione were and the one where Ron Weasley sat by himself, and sat down next to Harry. Ron smirked in a satisfied sort of way; Harry ignored him.

The thick rain splattering the windows made it very difficult to see out of them. Harry told himself that it was the combination of the lashing rain and weak sunlight that made Hermione’s expression look so dire when she turned to face him.

“Are you two all right?” she asked.

“What?” Harry frowned. “Yeah, of course we are. Why?”

Hermione’s thick eyebrows arched toward her hairline. “Because two senior Ministry officials put forth a lot of energy accusing the both of you of being the ones who summoned the Dark Mark at the World Cup?” she said tartly. “Remember that?”

“We’re hardly likely to forget,” Draco grumbled.

“Well then, are you all right?” Hermione repeated.

“Yeah,” said Harry, “yeah we’re fine. What about you—er—you two?” He glanced at Ron, who was pretending to be so interested in the rain that he wasn’t listening to any of them.

“We’re fine,” Hermione said, waving his concern away. “But Ron’s dad works for the Ministry, and I’m not likely to have learned any forbidden spells from my parents, am I?” From her tremulous smile she meant it as a joke, so Harry smiled back. He ignored the ugly scoffing sound he heard behind him, pointedly not turning around to look at Draco.

“You two, on the other hand….” Hermione’s smile faded. “Ron’s dad was worried that the Ministry might try and make scapegoats out of—er—one or the other of you, especially once the _Daily Prophet_ started printing all those nasty articles.”

Harry nodded as though he knew what she was talking about.

“The Ministry wouldn’t dare,” Draco sneered. “Anyone they sent ‘round our house to harass either of us would be lucky to still have a job once my father was done with them.”

_Or a pulse, once your mother was,_ Harry thought, but did not say.

Hermione nodded, but she didn’t look convinced. “Well…good, then,” she said. “We were all a bit worried.”

Ron grunted; it was impossible to say whether he was agreeing or disagreeing with her.

“Thanks for your concern,” Draco drawled. Unlike Ron, he made no effort to hide his sarcasm.

Hermione either didn’t notice or chose to ignore his tone. “Well,” she said briskly, “I’m glad no one’s in trouble. I do feel terrible for poor Winky, though—”

“I need to tell you about my scar hurting,” Harry blurted out. All three of them turned to stare at him, gaping. Harry regretted the words almost at once—especially because he had no desire to share private details like that with Ron Weasley, whom he hardly knew and didn’t much like—but he had spoken without thinking, hoping to distract Hermione from talking about house-elves before she could say something that would start an argument with Draco.

When the compartment door slid open, Harry groaned aloud, wishing that he could jump back in time twenty seconds and stop himself from speaking. If he had known that a different distraction was about to interrupt Hermione, he would have kept his mouth shut. Hoping that whoever had come in would say something interesting enough to make everyone forget what he had just said about his scar, Harry turned to face the door.

Gregory Goyle stood in the opening, his wide face screwed up in confusion. Harry could just make out the shape of Vincent Crabbe lurking over Goyle’s shoulder, his own even thicker face drawn in a frown. Both huge, both somewhat dim-witted, they were—aside from Draco—Harry’s best friends at Hogwarts.

“What’re you doing in here?” Goyle asked, looking back and forth between Draco and Harry, and Ron and Hermione.

“An excellent question,” Draco said snappishly.

“We saved you seats,” Goyle said. He sounded hurt.

“Sorry,” Harry said quickly, waving for the two of them to enter. “We were on our way to you, but got hung-up because Hermione wanted to talk to us about something.”

“Oh,” said Goyle. He looked over his shoulder at Crabbe, shrugged, and walked inside. He had to turn slightly sideways to get through the door; he had grown considerably over the summer, as had Crabbe, and neither one of them had been small to start with.

Crabbe followed Goyle inside and the both of them obediently plopped down on the bench next to Ron, who looked horrified with the new seating arrangements. Harry coughed into his sleeve to hide a chuckle.

“Hello!” Hermione said brightly.

Crabbe grunted and Goyle mumbled something that might have been a greeting.

“It’s nice to see you again,” she continued, once it became clear that they weren’t going to say anything else.

This time they both grunted.

“Have a good summer?” Hermione asked. Her smile was starting to look somewhat manic.

That earned her two more grunts. Hermione turned to Harry, a silent plea for help in her eyes. Harry, overjoyed that Crabbe and Goyle had proved such a surprisingly good distraction, barely managed not to grin. He shrugged helplessly, thinking that right now he could have gladly kissed either one of them for saving him from his fool mouth—but then Draco leaned forward and said in a demanding tone, “So what’s this about your scar, then?”

Harry swallowed hard and managed not to swear. “It’s nothing,” he began, but Ron spoke up suddenly from his corner of the compartment:

“Didn’t sound like nothing.”

Harry glared daggers at him. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.

“What’d you bring it up for, then?” Ron asked belligerently.

Harry scowled.

“D’you mean like when the Dark Lord was sneaking ‘round the castle first year?” Goyle asked.

Every eye—even Crabbe’s—turned to stare at him. Goyle flushed uncomfortably under the scrutiny and mumbled, “Never mind.”

“Your scar—?” Ron gaped.

“Hurt whenever You-Know-Who was near, yeah,” Harry answered tersely.

Draco stiffened. “And it’s hurting again _now?_ ” he asked.

“What?” said Harry. “No! No, of course not!”

The sudden tension that had gripped the compartment eased. Hermione sagged back against the seat cushions and let out a deep breath of air. Ron removed his hand from his pocket and edged a little farther away from Goyle. Draco scrubbed his hands over his face and snapped, “Don’t _do_ things like that!”

“Sorry,” said Harry. “I didn’t mean—” He shook his head. “My scar hurt when I woke up last week, all right? That’s all.”

Hermione’s reaction was almost exactly as Harry had imagined it back in his bedroom on Privet Drive: She gasped and started making suggestions at once, mentioning a number of reference books, and everybody from Albus Dumbledore to Madam Pomfrey, the Hogwarts nurse. Draco however said nothing at all, just stared at Harry through narrow eyes.

“But he can’t have been there, can he?” he finally asked in a low voice.

Harry shook his head. “I’m sure he wasn’t on Privet Drive,” he said. “But I was dreaming about him…him and Peter Pettigrew—you know, Wormtail.” Ron flinched, which made Harry feel slightly better about the way everyone else was staring at him. “I can’t remember all of it now,” he continued, “but they were plotting to kill…someone.”

He had teetered for a moment on the verge of saying “me,” but after remembering how Draco had been instructed to stay away from Harry last year when there had been rumors that Sirius Black was trying to kill him, he decided to keep that part of the dream to himself for now.

Hermione gave a little squeak of dismay and pressed her hands to her mouth. Draco shuddered and looked away. Crabbe and Goyle stared at him with near-identical frowns of confusion. After a while Goyle reached out and patted Harry awkwardly on the knee.

“It was only a dream,” said Ron bracingly from his corner, “just a nightmare.”

“Yeah, but was it, though?” said Harry, turning to look out of the window at the brightening sky. “It’s weird, isn’t it…? My scar hurts, and three days later the Death Eaters are on the march, and You-Know-Who’s sign is up in the sky again.”

“You don’t—don’t think _he_ was at the World Cup, do you?” Draco asked, gulping.

Harry shook his head. “Nah,” he said, “my scar didn’t hurt then.”

Draco relaxed a little but he still looked uncommonly pale, even for him.

“And remember what Professor Trelawney said?” Harry asked his fellow Slytherins. “At the end of last year?”

Professor Trelawney was their Divination teacher at Hogwarts. Hermione’s terrified look vanished as she let out a derisive snort.

“Oh Harry, you aren’t going to pay attention to anything that old fraud says?”

“You weren’t there,” said Harry. “You didn’t hear her. This time was different.”

“Yeah,” Crabbe agreed, “it was…spooky.” Goyle nodded along fervently.

“She went into a trance,” Harry explained, “a real one. And she said the Dark Lord would rise again… _greater and more terrible than ever before_ …and he’d manage it because his servant was going to come back to him…and that night Wormtail escaped.”

There was a silence in which Ron tried to hunch his shoulders up around his ears, as though to hide his face like a turtle. Goyle looked at him curiously.

“Why didn’t you tell my parents about this?” Draco demanded suddenly.

Harry flinched. “I didn’t want to upset them,” he said defensively. “I mean—what if it was just a dream? Anyway, I told Sirius.”

Hermione perked up at once at the mention of an adult being involved. “Ooh good idea,” she said. “What did he say about it?”

“Nothing yet,” said Harry, slumping against the cushions. “I haven’t gotten a letter back.”

The mood that spread over the compartment at that statement was bleak.

For a while they sat in moody silence, no one wanting to meet anyone else’s eye.

It was Crabbe who finally broke the quiet, demanding, “So tell us about the World Cup, then.”

Partly out of relief to have something else to talk about, and partly out of remembered excitement, Harry and Draco and Hermione and Ron all started talking at once. It was hard to tell exactly how much Crabbe and Goyle were taking in, but they listened in apparent fascination, and the others needed little encouragement to relive their favorite parts of the event again.

“Wish I coulda gone,” Crabbe grumbled, and Harry felt a brief flash of guilt. Would Draco have taken one of them, if Harry hadn’t been trapped with the Dursleys? For a moment he entertained the fantasy of Sirius exonerated, Sirius buying tickets to the Cup, Sirius and he setting up a tent together—then he shook his head, pushed the thoughts and the guilt aside, and rejoined the conversation just in time to argue with Ron over whether or not the Veela had been out of line when they’d briefly entranced the referee.

“His job was paying attention to the match, not the mascots.”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t their fault he was watching them, was it?” It was hard to tell with a complexion like his, but Harry thought Ron’s cheeks looked a little pink underneath their generous coating of freckles.

“You know they did it on purpose,” Harry said.

Surprisingly, it was Hermione who spoke up in defense of the Veela: “Yes, but Harry, it’s traditional for the mascots to try and disrupt the game, and referees ought to be prepared to defend against such antics. There have been no less than four hundred and fifteen matches where one or both teams’ mascots were subject to official chastisement, according to _The Official Guide to the Quidditch World Cup_ , and two hundred and twelve recorded cases of expulsion of one or both—”

Everyone groaned. “You’re not quoting from that over-priced doorstop again!” Ron exclaimed. “Come off it, Hermione, you’ve been parroting that thing since dad picked you up. What did you do, memorize every page?”

“Well I wanted to be prepared,” Hermione said hotly. “A little bit of light research never hurt anyone—”

“Says you,” Ron and Crabbe retorted in unison. It was hard to say which of them looked more horrified as they goggled at one another.

Hermione sniffed disdainfully and buried herself in _The Standard Book of Spells, Grade 4_. From the sound of the muttering that Harry couldn’t help but overhear, she was trying to learn a Summoning Charm.

Everyone else fell quiet and for several minutes, a warm feeling of camaraderie banished the gloom both of the earlier conversation about Harry’s dream and the dreary day outside. The rain became heavier and heavier as the train moved farther north. The sky was so dark and the windows so steamy that the lanterns were lit by midday. The lunch trolley came rattling along the corridor. Crabbe and Goyle, of course, bought their usual mounds of sweets, which they jealously guarded. Between what Harry and Draco bought, though, there was plenty more to go around and when Harry absent-mindedly tossed a Cauldron Cake to Ron, he was taken aback when the other boy blushed and mumbled a thank you.

For a moment, it seemed like the uniting effects of the Quidditch World Cup might carry them all the way to Hogwarts, but then Crookshanks jumped down to sniff at the piles of uneaten treats.

Draco pointed at the corner of the luggage rack the cat had vacated and asked, “What is that?”

A maroon sleeve with a moldy lace cuff was now dangling loose, swaying with the motion of the train.

Ron made to stuff the bundle out of sight, but Draco was too quick for him; he jumped to his feet and caught the sleeve, pulling until the whole garment came loose.

“Look at this!” he said in ecstasy, holding up something that looked to Harry like a long, velvet dress. It had a moldy-looking lace frill at the collar and matching lace cuffs. “Weasley, you weren’t thinking of _wearing_ these, were you? I mean—they were very fashionable in about 1890….”

“Eat dung, Malfoy!” said Ron, the same color as the dress as he snatched it back out of Draco’s grip. Draco howled with derisive laughter; Crabbe and Goyle guffawed dutifully. Harry couldn’t help but chuckle but he cleared his throat to try and hide it, and asked, “But what are they, though? No really—I’m asking!” He held up his hands in a protestation of innocence when Ron rounded on him with a scowl.

“Dress robes,” Ron muttered after a moment, having apparently decided that Harry meant the question genuinely. “I didn’t pick them out.”

“Well then you’ve only yourself to blame,” Draco told him tartly, flopping back into his seat with a satisfied air. “Who chose them for you, your great-great-great aunt?”

Ron’s scowl deepened, as did his blush, but he didn’t say anything.

“I think they’ve very—er—fetching,” Hermione lied. “Classic, you know.”

“What would you know about classic?” Draco retorted.

“So what about the tournament, yeah?” Harry said loudly, hoping to change the subject. “Going to enter?”

“I expect Weasley will,” Draco said, smirking unpleasantly. “Try and bring a bit of glory to the family name? There’s money involved as well, you know…you’d be able to afford some decent robes if you won….”

“What are you talking about?” snapped Ron.

_“Are you going to enter?”_ Draco repeated. “I suppose _you_ will, Granger? At least if they ask for volunteers by show of hands….” He snorted.

“Either explain what you’re on about or talk about something else,” said Hermione testily, over the top of _The Standard Book of Spells, Grade 4._

A gleeful smile spread across Draco’s pale face.

“Don’t tell me you don’t _know?_ ” he said delightedly. “You’ve got a father and brother at the Ministry and you don’t even _know?_ My God, _my_ father told me about it ages ago…heard it from Cornelius Fudge. But then, Father’s always associated with the top people at the Ministry….Maybe your father’s too junior to know about it, Weasley…yes…they probably don’t talk about important stuff in front of him….”

Harry rolled his eyes and leaned forward, trying to cut off Hermione and Ron’s view of Draco. “It’s this thing called the Triwiz—” he began, but Draco shushed him.

“No—better not,” he said, his brow furrowed in a concerned frown that Harry was pretty sure was fake. “It’s probably not a good idea to go telling too many people, actually. I don’t think father was supposed to even tell us, strictly speaking, but of course he’d never keep something like that from me, and it would’ve been rude not to tell you, with you staying with us for the summer….”

“Then wouldn’t it be rude not to tell them now?” Harry asked, trying to sound patient.

Draco sighed and shook his head. “Can’t be too careful,” he said loftily. “You wouldn’t want word to get back to Fudge that you were blathering on about confidential Ministry details, would you?”

Harry stared at Draco, trying to figure out if he was being serious or if he was just making excuses so he could annoy Hermione and Ron by lording something over them. Draco was right about one thing: the last thing Harry wanted to do right now was risk upsetting Fudge….

He sighed and slumped back in his chair. “Fine,” he muttered. “You’re right.”

Draco gave the others an oily smile. “Don’t worry,” he said in tones that dripped treacle, “I’m sure you’ll find out once we get to Hogwarts.”

Hermione sniffed and went back to her book; Ron stuffed his horrible dress robes back into his trunk and sat in the corner with his arms folded and a scowl on his face for the rest of the ride. No one talked much as they changed into their school robes—Crabbe and Goyle belatedly realizing that their trunks were still in the compartment they had been intending to share with Harry and Draco, although since that was right next door to the one they were in now, it wasn’t as much of an inconvenience as it might have been. Privately, Harry thought it was just as well that they had to leave, because with all six of them trying to change in the same compartment things would have been a bit tight, given how bulky both Crabbe and Goyle were.

The Hogwarts Express slowed down at last and finally stopped in the pitch-darkness of Hogsmeade station.

As the train doors opened, there was a rumble of thunder overhead. Hermione bundled up Crookshanks in her cloak and Draco pulled the purple cover back down over Bowman’s cage as they left the train, heads bent and eyes narrowed against the downpour. The rain was now coming down so thick and fast that it was as though buckets of ice-cold water were being emptied repeatedly over their heads.

“Hi, Hagrid!” Harry yelled, seeing a gigantic silhouette at the far end of the platform.

“All righ’, Harry?” Hagrid bellowed back, waving. “See yeh at the feast if we don’ drown!”

First years traditionally reached Hogwarts Castle by sailing across the lake with Hagrid.

“Oooh, I wouldn’t fancy crossing the lake in this weather,” said Hermione fervently.

“Better them than me,” Draco retorted shortly, shivering as they inched slowly along the dark platform with the rest of the crowd. Even with Crabbe and Goyle there to push and shove for them, no one was moving fast in the treacherous weather. A hundred horseless carriages stood waiting for them outside the station. Harry, Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle climbed gratefully into one of them—“See you later,” Hermione called, her voice tiny underneath the pounding of the rain, as she and Ron climbed into another—and the door shut with a snap, and a few moments later, with a great lurch, the long procession of carriages was rumbling and splashing its way up the track towards Hogwarts Castle.


	9. The Triwizard Tournament

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This section consists mainly of one long excerpt from Chapter Twelve, stretching from page 171 to 192 of the American hardcover edition, although it is interspersed with several minor alterations and additions.

Through the gates, flanked with statues of winged boars, and up the sweeping drive the carriages trundled, swaying dangerously in what was fast becoming a gale. Leaning against the window, Harry could see Hogwarts coming nearer, its many lighted windows blurred and shimmering behind the thick curtain of rain. Lightning flashed across the sky as their carriage came to a halt before the great oak doors, which stood at the top of a flight of stone steps. People who had occupied the carriages in front were already hurrying up the stone steps into the castle. Harry, Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle jumped down from their carriage and dashed up the steps too, looking up only when they were safely inside the cavernous, torch-lit entrance hall, with its magnificent marble staircase.

“Blimey,” said Ron, shaking his head and sending water everywhere as he and Hermione caught up, “if that keeps up the lake’s going to overflow. I’m soak—ARRGH!”

A large, red, water-filled balloon had dropped from out of the ceiling onto Ron’s head and exploded. Drenched and sputtering, Ron staggered sideways into Harry, just as a second water bomb dropped—narrowly missing Hermione, it burst at Harry’s feet, sending a wave of cold water over his trainers and into his socks. People all around them shrieked and started pushing one another in their efforts to get out of the line of fire. Draco ducked down next to Crabbe, as though hoping to use him as an umbrella, and shoved to propel the larger boy toward the door. Crabbe obediently waded forward, his broad shoulders clearing a path for the others to follow. Harry looked up as he fled and saw, floating twenty feet above them, Peeves the Poltergeist, a little man in a bell-covered hat and orange bow tie, his wide, malicious face contorted with concentration as he took aim again.

“PEEVES!” yelled an angry voice. “Peeves, come down here at ONCE!”

Professor McGonagall, deputy headmistress and Head of Gryffindor House, had come dashing out of the Great Hall. Harry ducked his head and hurried after Crabbe and the others, getting out of the way before the inevitable row started; Peeves never took it well when teachers tried ordering him to behave, although he listened to McGonagall more than he did most of the staff.

Harry, Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle slipped and slid across the entrance hall and through the double doors on the right, Hermione and Ron lost somewhere behind them in the crowd.

The Great Hall looked its usual splendid self, decorated for the start-of-term feast. Golden plates and goblets gleamed by the light of hundreds and hundreds of candles, floating over the tables in midair. The four long House tables were packed with chattering students; at the top of the Hall, the staff sat along one side of a fifth table, facing their pupils. It was much warmer in here. Harry, Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle walked to the nearest table and sat down with the rest of the Slytherins, careful to choose seats far away from the Bloody Baron, the Slytherin ghost.

They ended up sitting across from a group of small second year girls, including little Astoria Greengrass who was barely visible underneath her dripping curls. She turned pink when she saw Harry and squeaked, “Good evening!”

“If you say so,” said Harry curtly, taking off his trainers and emptying them of water. “Hope they hurry up with the Sorting. I’m starving.”

The Sorting of the new students into Houses took place at the start of every school year, but by an unlucky combination of circumstances, Harry hadn’t been present at one since his own. He was quite looking forward to it. Just then, a gruff voice called from down the table, “Oi, Malfoy! Potter!”

Harry and Draco turned to see Graham Montague, one of their fellow players on the Slytherin Quidditch team, leaning in across the table so he could see past the handful of students sitting between them. “You heard anything about who’s going to be Quidditch captain this year?”

They both shook their heads. “No,” said Draco, “who is it?”

“I don’t know!” said Montague. He sounded furious. “I’ve asked everybody on the team now—even Pucey—and no one knows anything! You don’t think Snape forgot to choose someone, do you?”

“He’s probably just waiting for a dramatic moment to make the reveal,” Draco suggested, but Montague waved the idea away impatiently.

“The captain always gets a letter over the summer—so he’s got time to prepare, right?”

“Well then I suppose he’s chosen someone you haven’t asked yet,” Draco said tartly.

“He better not have,” Montague fumed. “If he chose somebody who’s never even flown on the team before….”

“I’m telling you,” Draco insisted, “he’s just waiting for the right moment to make the announcement.”

Montague slid back into his seat, muttering foully under his breath.

Harry looked up at the staff table. There seemed to be rather more empty seats there than usual. Hagrid, of course, was still fighting his way across the lake with the first years; Professor McGonagall was presumably supervising the drying of the entrance hall floor or fighting with Peeves; but there was another empty chair too, and Harry couldn’t think who else was missing.

“Wonder who they found for Defense Against the Dark Arts this year,” mused Draco, who was also looking up at the teachers.

They had never yet had a Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher who had lasted more than three terms. Harry’s favorite by far had been Professor Lupin, who had tendered his resignation at the very end of last year in the face of parental outcries after everyone had found out he was a werewolf. He looked up and down the staff table. There was definitely no new face there.

“You don’t think they finally gave it to Professor Snape, do you?” Harry asked.

Draco shook his head. “No,” he said, “Snape doesn’t look smug enough for that.”

Harry scanned the table more carefully. Tiny little Professor Flitwick, the Charms teacher, was sitting on a large pile of cushions beside Professor Sprout, the Herbology teacher, whose hat was askew over her flyaway gray hair. She was talking to Professor Sinistra of the Astronomy department. On Professor Sinistra’s other side was the sallow-faced, hook-nosed, greasy-haired Potions Master, Snape—the Head of Slytherin House, and Draco’s favorite teacher. Harry couldn’t make up his mind how he felt about Snape, but since Snape didn’t seem to be able to make up his mind how he felt about Harry, that worked out all right.

On Snape’s other side was an empty seat, which Harry guessed was Professor McGonagall’s. Next to it, and in the very center of the table, sat Professor Dumbledore, the headmaster, his sweeping silver hair and beard shining in the candlelight, his magnificent deep green robes embroidered with many stars and moons. The tips of Dumbledore’s long, thin fingers were together and he was resting his chin upon them, staring up at the ceiling through his half-moon spectacles as though lost in thought. Harry glanced up at the ceiling too. It was enchanted to look like the sky outside, and he had never seen it look this stormy. Black and purple clouds were swirling across it, and as another thunderclap sounded outside, a fork of lightning flashed across it.

“When are we gonna eat?” Crabbe grumbled. “I bet the first years all drowned anyway. No point waiting for ‘em.”

The words were no sooner out of his mouth than the doors of the Great Hall opened and silence fell. Professor McGonagall was leading a long line of first years up to the top of the Hall. If Harry, Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle were wet, it was nothing to how these first years looked. They appeared to have swum across the lake rather than sailed. All of them were shivering with a combination of cold and nerves as they filed along the staff table and came to a halt in a line facing the rest of the school—all of them except the smallest of the lot, a boy with mousy hair, who was wrapped in what Harry recognized as Hagrid’s moleskin overcoat. The coat was so big for him that it looked as though he were draped in a furry black circus tent. His small face protruded from over the collar, looking almost painfully excited. When he had lined up with his terrified-looking peers, he caught the eye of someone in the watching crowd, gave a double thumbs-up, and mouthed, _I fell in the lake!_ He looked positively delighted about it.

Professor McGonagall now placed a four-legged stool on the ground before the first years and, on top of it, an extremely old, dirty, patched wizard’s hat. The first years stared at it. So did everyone else. For a moment, there was silence. Then a long tear near the brim opened wide like a mouth, and the hat broke into song.

Harry had thought that the song was a standard part of the Sorting Ceremony, but the words the hat sang this year were new—more about the history of the sorting than the traits of each house, from what he remembered of the one he had heard before his own sorting. He frowned, but clapped along with everyone else when the Sorting Hat finished.

“That’s not the song it sang when it Sorted us,” he said.

“Of course not,” said Draco. He shrugged. “Why would it use the same one twice? It’s not like it’s got anything else to do all year but think of a new one, anyway.”

Professor McGonagall was now unrolling a large scroll of parchment. The rest of the Sorting at least proceeded as he expected, with the students called up one by one to try on the hat before being sent off to their disparate tables. Harry applauded dutifully for everyone, even the Gryffindors, but he cheered loudest for the new Slytherin students.

Crabbe only clapped for the first four; then he growled that it was taking too long and put his head down on the table, trying to ignore the world until the food arrived. Draco rolled his eyes but let him be. Harry looked away to hide his smirk and saw Hagrid sidle into the Hall through a door behind the teacher’s table. About twice as tall as a normal man, and at least three times as broad, Hagrid, with his long, wild, tangled black hair and beard, looked slightly alarming—a misleading impression, for Harry knew Hagrid to possess a very kind nature. He winked at Harry as he sat down at the end of the staff table and watched the boy wearing his moleskin putting on the Sorting Hat.

Harry waved back and belatedly joined his housemates in their perfunctory applause for Dennis Creevey. He wondered if he was related to Colin Creevey, little Ginny Weasley’s friend from Gryffindor, but he didn’t wonder very hard. Like Crabbe, he was starting to get more interested in the imminent feast than in the new students.

The Sorting continued; boys and girls with varying degrees of fright on their faces moving one by one to the four-legged stool, the line dwindling slowly as Professor McGonagall read through the seemingly endless list of names.

Finally, with “Whitby, Kevin!” (“HUFFLEPUFF!”), the Sorting ended. Professor McGonagall picked up the hat and the stool and carried them away.

“Thank Merlin,” Crabbe moaned, lifting his head from his arms and gripping the edges of his golden plate, staring hard into its gleaming surface as though trying to will the promised food to appear.

Professor Dumbledore had gotten to his feet. He was smiling around at the students, his arms opened wide in welcome.

“I have only two words to say to you,” he told them, his deep voice echoing around the Hall. _“Tuck in.”_

“Hear, hear!” said Harry and Goyle loudly as the empty dishes filled magically before their eyes. Crabbe said nothing; he was already shoveling food into his mouth.

For a long time Harry didn’t care about anything but eating as much of everything as he could reach. He had been much better fed during his week at the Malfoys’ than he ever was at the Dursleys’, but breakfast had been a long time ago and the huge pile of snacks they had consumed on the train had seemed much less filling during the carriage ride up through the rain than they had when Harry was eating them.

He sat back at the end of his third helping, sighing in contentment and rubbing his stomach. “That’s much better,” he said happily, although his friends didn’t answer; on one side of him, Crabbe and Goyle were both working on their fifth helpings, Goyle looking like he was on the brink of embarking on a sixth, and Draco was bent in quiet conversation with Pansy Parkinson on the other.

The rain was still drumming heavily against the high, dark glass. Another clap of thunder shook the windows, and the stormy ceiling flashed, illuminating the golden plates as the remains of the first course vanished and were replaced, instantly, with puddings.

Harry suddenly found that he still had room for more, and straightened up to cut himself a slice of chocolate gateau for starters.

When the puddings too had been demolished, and the last crumbs had faded off the plates, leaving them sparkling clean, Professor Dumbledore got to his feet again. The buzz of chatter filling the Hall ceased almost at once, so that only the howling wind and pounding rain could be heard.

“So!” said Dumbledore, smiling around at them all. “Now that we are all fed and watered, I must once more ask for your attention, while I give out a few notices.

“Mr. Filch, the caretaker, has asked me to tell you that the list of objects forbidden inside the castle has this year been extended to include Screaming Yo-Yos, Fanged Frisbees, and Ever-Bashing Boomerangs. The full list comprises some four hundred and thirty-seven items, I believe, and can be viewed in Mr. Filch’s office, if anybody would like to check it.”

The corners of Dumbledore’s mouth twitched. He continued, “As ever, I would like to remind you all that the forest on the grounds is out-of-bounds to students, as is the village of Hogsmeade to all below third year (“Suckers,” chuckled Crabbe).

“It is also my painful duty to inform you that the Inter-House Quidditch Cup will not take place this year.”

 _“What?”_ Harry gasped. He looked at Draco, the reserve Seeker on Slytherin’s team. He looked as appalled as Harry felt and given that he was not already vowing to write home immediately and demand parental intervention, he must have felt as bewildered too. Dumbledore went on, “This is due to an event that will be starting in October, and continuing throughout the school year, taking up much of the teachers’ time and energy—but I am sure you will enjoy it immensely (“Ah!” said Draco, “of course!”). I have great pleasure in announcing that this year at Hogwarts—”

But at that moment, there was a deafening rumble of thunder and the doors of the Great Hall banged open.

A man stood in the doorway, leaning upon a long staff, shrouded in a black traveling cloak. Every head in the Great Hall swiveled toward the stranger, suddenly brightly illuminated by a fork of lightning that flashed across the ceiling. He lowered his hood, shook out a long mane of grizzled, dark gray hair, then began to walk up toward the teachers’ table.

A dull _clunk_ echoed through the Hall on his every other step. He reached the end of the top table, turned right, and limped heavily toward Dumbledore. Another flash of lightning crossed the ceiling. Draco yelped.

The lightning had thrown the man’s face into sharp relief, and it was a face unlike any Harry had ever seen. It looked as though it had been carved out of weathered wood by someone who had only the vaguest idea of what human faces were supposed to look like, and was none too skilled with a chisel. Every inch of skin seemed to be scarred. The mouth looked like a diagonal gash, and a large chunk of the nose was missing. But it was the man’s eyes that made him frightening.

One of them was small, dark, and beady. The other was large, round as a coin, and a vivid, electric blue. The blue eye was moving ceaselessly, without blinking, and was rolling up, down, and from side to side, quite independently of the normal eye—and then it rolled right over, pointing into the back of the man’s head, so that all they could see was whiteness.

The stranger reached Dumbledore. He stretched out a hand that was as badly scarred as his face, and Dumbledore shook it, muttering words Harry couldn’t hear. He seemed to be making some inquiry of the stranger, who shook his head unsmilingly and replied in an undertone. Dumbledore nodded and gestured the man to the empty seat on his right-hand side.

The stranger sat down, shook his name of dark gray hair out of his face, pulled a plate of sausages toward him, raised it to what was left of his nose, and sniffed it. He then took a small knife out of his pocket, speared a sausage on the end of it, and began to eat. His normal eye was fixed upon the sausages, but the blue eye was still darting restlessly around in its socket, taking in the Hall and the students.

“May I introduce our new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher?” said Dumbledore brightly into the silence. “Professor Moody.”

It was usual for new staff members to be greeted with applause, but none of the staff or students clapped except Dumbledore and Hagrid, who both put their hands together and applauded, but the sound echoed dismally into the silence, and they stopped fairly quickly. Everyone else seemed too transfixed by Moody’s bizarre appearance to do more than stare at him.

“Moody?” Draco repeated in a hushed voice. “Not—not _Mad-Eye Moody_ , surely!” His pale face had gone bone-white and his eyes were as wide as saucers. He stared at Moody as if he had seen a boggart. “My—my parents have told me about him. He’s…”

But whatever he was, Draco didn’t say; just swallowed hard.

“What about him?” Harry asked eagerly.

It was a moment before Draco spoke. He seemed to be choosing his words with care. “He was an Auror—you know, one of the Ministry’s hunters? He was…people said he was every bit as dangerous as the people he caught. He killed one of my mother’s cousins.”

“He did _what?”_ Harry exclaimed.

That seemed to shake Draco from his fugue. His eyes darted away from Moody for a moment, caught the expression on Harry’s face, and then flicked back to the new teacher. “Well, it was during the War and all very complicated. Mother’s cousin was…not on the Ministry’s side, you know?” He shrugged delicately and the fixed expression on his pale face told Harry that he wasn’t going to say any more.

Harry turned back to the staff table, wondering what it felt like to kill a man.

Moody seemed totally indifferent to his less-than-warm welcome. Ignoring the jug of pumpkin juice in front of him, he reached again into his traveling cloak, pulled out a hip flask, and took a long draught from it. As he lifted his arm to drink, his cloak was pulled a few inches from the ground, and Harry saw, below the table, several inches of carved wooden leg ending in a clawed food.

Dumbledore cleared his throat.

“As I was saying,” he said, smiling at the sea of students before him, all of whom were still gazing transfixed at Mad-Eye Moody, “we are to have the honor of hosting a very exciting event over the coming months, an event that has not been held for over a century. It is my very great pleasure to inform you that the Triwizard Tournament will be taking place at Hogwarts this year.”

“You’re JOKING!” said one of the Weasley twins, loudly enough that Harry heard him clearly all the way on the other side of the room.

The tension that had filled the Hall ever since Moody’s arrival suddenly broke. Nearly everyone laughed, and Dumbledore chuckled appreciatively.

“I am _not_ joking, Mr. Weasley,” he said, “though now that you mention it, I did hear an excellent one over the summer about a troll, a hag, and a leprechaun who all go into a bar…”

Professor McGonagall cleared her throat loudly.

“Er—but maybe this is not the time…no…” said Dumbledore. (“Aw,” said Goyle, disappointed.) “Where was I? Ah yes, the Triwizard Tournament…well, some of you will not know what this tournament involves, so I hope those who _do_ know will forgive me for giving a short explanation, and allow their attention to wander freely.”

Draco seemed to take that as an invitation for he jumped out of his seat and scurried down the table to join Theodore Nott for a whispered conversation. Theodore looked like he would rather listen to Dumbledore, but Draco wasn’t giving him a choice. Harry was torn between following his friend and paying attention to Dumbledore’s explanation of the Triwizard Tournament. He had heard all about it from the Malfoys of course, but he thought Dumbledore might say something he hadn’t heard before—and when his distracted brain caught the words, “death toll,” he wrenched his gaze away from Draco and Theodore and back up to the headmaster.

Dumbledore said nothing more about any deaths, though, just told them that, “We have worked hard over the summer to ensure that this time, no champion will find himself or herself in mortal danger.”

“Where’s the fun in that?” Crabbe grumbled.

“The Heads of Beauxbatons and Durmstrang will be arriving with their shortlisted contenders in October,” Dumbledore continued, “and the selection of the three champions will take place at Halloween. An impartial judge will decide which students are most worthy to compete for the Triwizard Cup, the glory of their school, and a thousand Galleons personal prize money.”

“That’s a lot of prize moneys,” Goyle said, his face lit with wonder. “And we just have to fight dang’rous stuff to get it?”

“Brilliant,” said Crabbe, cracking his knuckles in anticipation. They were not the only people who seemed to be visualizing themselves as Hogwarts champion. At every House table, Harry could see people either gazing raptly at Dumbledore, or else whispering fervently to their neighbors. But then Dumbledore spoke again, and the Hall quieted once more.

“Eager though I know all of you will be eager to bring the Triwizard Cup to Hogwarts,” he said, “the Heads of the participating schools, along with the Ministry of Magic, have agreed to impose an age restriction on contenders this year. Only students who are of age—that is to say, seventeen years or older—will be allowed to put forward their names for consideration. This”  —Dumbledore raised his voice slightly, for several people had made noises of outrage at these words, and Draco had jerked away from his conversation with Theodore to squawk with indignation— “is a measure we feel is necessary, given that the tournament tasks will still be difficult and dangerous, whatever precautions we take, and it is highly unlikely that students below sixth and seventh year will be able to cope with them. I will personally be ensuring that no underage student hoodwinks our impartial judge into making them Hogwarts champion.” His light blue eyes twinkled as they flickered over the younger students’ mutinous faces. “I therefore beg you not to waste your time submitting yourself if you are under seventeen.

“The delegations from Beauxbatons and Durmstrang will be arriving in October and remaining with us for the greater part of this year. I know that you will all extend every courtesy to our foreign guests while they are with us, and will give your whole-hearted support to the Hogwarts champion when he or she is selected. And now, it is late, and I know how important it is to you all to be alert and rested as you enter your lessons tomorrow morning. Bedtime! Chop chop!”

Dumbledore sat down again and turned to talk to Mad-Eye Moody. There was a great scraping and banging as all the students got to their feet and swarmed toward the double doors into the entrance hall.

Draco bolted back to his friends’ sides. “Seventeen or older?” he exclaimed. “That’s ridiculous! They can’t do that!”

“They can’t?” Goyle frowned in confusion. “Somebody ought to tell Dumbledore, then….”

Draco ignored him. “Father didn’t say anything about an age restriction. I bet the Ministry didn’t even agree to that, it’s just some fool idea of Dumbledore’s. I bet the other Heads don’t even know about it. I’m sure Karkaroff wouldn’t agree to something so stupid, father says he’s much more sensible than Dumbledore. An age restriction! It’s not fair, we won’t be seventeen for years!”

Harry grunted, nodding his agreement, but didn’t try to interrupt. When Draco was this upset about something, he didn’t want to listen to anything that anyone else had to say, even if they were agreeing with him.

“Well I’m not waiting. What if they decide not to hold it again when we’re in our seventh year? No, we’ve got to enter now if we want to be champion, I reckon. There must be some way around whatever precautions Dumbledore is going to put in place. Maybe an Aging Potion, or even Polyjuice might work—I’m going to write to father, he’ll know how to fix this. An _age_ restriction, can you _believe_ it….”

He continued to rant as they fell in with the rest of the Slytherins for the walk down to their dungeon common room. He wasn’t the only one complaining, although most of the older students—those who were, or would be, seventeen by October—were gushing excitedly about their chances of being chosen as champion.

“Who’s this impartial judge who’s going to decide who the champions are?” said Harry.

“That’s a good question,” Draco said darkly. “Nobody’s really impartial, you just have to figure out what they care about so you know what kind of leverage you need.”

“Think Dumbledore knows how old you are, though,” Crabbe pointed out, chuckling.

Draco rolled his eyes. “So what?” he said. “Dumbledore isn’t the one who matters. If he’s leaving the choice up to someone else, then it’s _them_ who will have the power to decide who is, and who isn’t, champion material.” He smiled coldly. “Dumbledore can make whatever rules he wants, that doesn’t mean we have to _listen_.”

Crabbe grunted understanding, but Goyle still looked confused. “But I thought they couldn’t?” he asked.

Draco ignored him again. “You’ll be entering anyway of course, right Harry?” he asked. “You aren’t going to let some silly edict of Dumbledore’s stop you, are you?”

“Of course not,” Harry said automatically, although he couldn’t help remembering what Dumbledore had said about people dying. “If we can figure out how to get around whatever he does to stop us, that is.”

Draco waved a hand airily. “I bet if we talk to Snape, he’ll give us a way around it; he’d want the champion to be a Slytherin, wouldn’t he? And we’re definitely two of his best options there.” He tossed his head arrogantly and smoothed his blond hair back from his forehead, as if he were already posing for victory photographs.

“Right,” Harry said, although he wasn’t as sure as Draco that Snape would bend the rules for them—at least not _both_ of them.

They followed the other Slytherins through the hidden door in the stone wall that concealed their common room from other students. A crackling fire warmed the long, low underground room, which was full of tall old chairs and elegant couches. The windows that looked out into the lake were dark, practically blacked-out from the intensity of the storm overhead. It was chilly, despite the fireplace’s best efforts, and Harry and his friends lost no time in bidding the other Slytherins good night and heading straight for the doorway that led to the boys’ dormitory.

Harry, Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle joined their fellow Slytherin fourth years—Theodore Nott and Blaise Zabini—on the climb down the stairs to their underwater dormitory. Six four-poster beds with rich emerald hangings stood against the walls, each with its owner’s trunk at the foot. Goyle lost no time in yanking his pyjamas on and by the time anyone else was ready to climb into bed, he was already snoring.

Someone had placed warming pans between the sheets. It was extremely comfortable, lying there in bed and listening to the insulating silence of water pressing comfortingly against the windows.

“Psst,” Draco hissed, “Harry! When I write to father and tell him he needs to fix it so I can enter the tournament, you want me to include you too, right?”

“Oh…yeah, all right,” Harry said. “Might as well. I mean, you never know, do you?”

“Thought so,” Draco said smugly, and snuggled down in his blankets.

Harry rolled over in bed, a series of dazzling new pictures forming in his mind’s eye…. He had hoodwinked the impartial judge into believing he was seventeen…he had become Hogwarts champion…he was standing on the grounds, his arms raised in triumph in front of the whole school, all of whom were applauding and screaming…he had just won the Triwizard Tournament…. Cho’s face stood out particularly clearly in the blurred crowd, her face glowing with admiration….

Harry grinned into his pillow, exceptionally glad that Draco couldn’t see what he could.


	10. Mad-Eye Moody

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This section contains several excerpts from Chapter Thirteen, reaching from page 193 to page 208 of the American hardcover edition.

The storm had blown itself out by the following morning, though the ceiling in the Great Hall was still gloomy; heavy clouds of pewter gray swirled overhead as Harry, Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle examined their new course schedules at breakfast. A few seats along, Pansy, Daphne, and Millicent were discussing what they would do with a thousand Galleons.

“Divination first thing,” Draco said, impatiently tapping his schedule. “Then Care of Magical Creatures right after, that’s ridiculous…one end of the castle to the other, eugh….”

“History of Magic this afternoon, too,” Harry said, and groaned. It had always seemed highly unfair to him that a class about the history of the magical world could be so boring. It was better than Divination, at least; Professor Trelawney had a habit of predicting Harry’s death, which he found extremely annoying.

“The worst thing about a ghost professor,” Draco complained, “is that he’s already deceased, so there’s no chance that he’ll drop dead in the middle of a lesson and let somebody more interesting take over the class.”

Harry laughed.

There was a sudden rustling noise above them, and a hundred owls came soaring through the open windows carrying the morning mail. Instinctively, Harry looked up, but there was no sign of white among the mass of brown and gray. The owls circled the tables, looking for the people to whom their letters and packages were addressed. Bowman, Draco’s eagle owl, landed neatly on his shoulder, carrying what looked like his usual supply of sweets and cakes from home. Harry wondered idly if the reason his parents made sure to send candy regularly by mail was because they wanted to make sure that Crabbe and Goyle couldn’t eat all of Draco’s snacks on the train ride to school. On the other side of the hall, a large tawny owl soared down to Neville Longbottom and deposited a parcel into his lap—Longbottom almost always forgot to pack something. Trying to ignore the sinking feeling of disappointment in his stomach, Harry returned to his porridge. Was it possible that something had happened to Hedwig, and that Sirius hadn’t even got his letter?

His preoccupation lasted all the way to the North Tower where, at the top of a tightly spiraling staircase, a silver stepladder led to a circular trapdoor in the ceiling, and the room where Professor Trelawney lived.

The familiar sweet perfume spreading from the fire met their nostrils as they emerged at the top of the stepladder. As ever, the curtains were all closed; the circular room was bathed in a dim reddish light cast by the many lamps, which were all draped with scarves and shawls. Harry, Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle walked through the mass of occupied chintz chairs and poufs that cluttered the room, and sat down at two adjoining small circular tables.

Few of the students were talking, and none of them loudly; everyone else in the class seemed as nervous as Harry felt to be returning to the Divination classroom after a summer away.

“Good day,” said the misty voice of Professor Trelawney right behind Harry, making him jump.

A very thin woman with enormous glasses that made her eyes appear far too large for her face, Professor Trelawney was peering down at Harry with the tragic expression she always wore whenever she saw him. The usual large amount of beads, chains, and bangles glittered upon her person in the firelight.

“You are preoccupied, my dear,” she said mournfully to Harry. “My inner eye sees past your brave face to the troubled soul within. And I regret to say that your worries are not baseless. I see difficult times ahead for you, alas…most difficult…I fear the thing you dread will indeed come to pass…and perhaps sooner than you think….”

Her voice dropped almost to a whisper. Harry’s stomach lurched. He and Draco exchanged wide-eyed, worried glances but said nothing. Professor Trelawney swept past them and seated herself in a large winged armchair before the fire, facing the class. Millicent Bulstrode and Lilian Moon, who deeply admired Professor Trelawney, were sitting on poufs very close to her. Daphne Greengrass, ordinarily a close friend of Millicent’s, was sitting behind the taller girl with a sulky expression on her round face; Daphne did much care for Trelawney. Harry could sympathize.

“My dears, it is time for us to consider the stars,” Trelawney said. “The movements of the planets and the mysterious portents they reveal only to those who understand the steps of the celestial dance. Human destiny may be deciphered by the planetary rays, which intermingle…”

But Harry’s thoughts had drifted. The perfumed fire usually made him feel sleepy and dull-witted, and Professor Trelawney’s rambling talks on fortune telling never held him exactly spellbound—but now he felt too jittery to relax, despite the stuffy air and dim lighting. He couldn’t help thinking about what she had just said to him. _“’I fear the thing you dread will indeed come to pass…’”_

The only thing he was dreading right now was that Sirius might be caught before he could be proved innocent; could Trelawney be predicting that very thing? This sounded like her usual useless mumbo-jumbo, but Harry couldn't forget the trance she had gone into near exams last year, when she had made the prediction about Voldemort rising again...and Dumbledore himself had said that he thought that trance had been genuine, when Harry had described it to him.... He wondered if the rest of the class was thinking about that today....

None of them knew how right she had been aside from he, Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle, because none of the others knew that that had been the night Peter Pettigrew had escaped—but did that mean that You-Know-Who was even now in the process of returning to power? What else did Professor Trelawney know about Voldemort, and was there any way that Harry could get her to share those predictions instead of the stupid ones she kept making about his ugly, imminent death? Maybe if he pretended to see something about He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named in a crystal ball the next time she pulled them out….

 _“Hsst! Harry!”_ Draco kicked him in the ankle.

“What?”

Harry looked around; the whole class was staring at him. He sat up straight; he had been paying no attention to the lesson, lost instead in the heat and his thoughts.

“I was saying, my dear, that you were clearly born under the baleful influence of Saturn,” said Professor Trelawney, a faint note of resentment in her voice at the fact that he had obviously not been hanging on her words.

“Born under—what, sorry?” said Harry.

“Saturn, dear, the planet Saturn!” said Professor Trelawney, sounding definitely irritated that he wasn’t riveted by this news. “I was saying that Saturn was surely in a position of power in the heavens at the moment of your birth.... Your dark hair...your mean stature...tragic losses so young in life...I think I am right in saying, my dear, that you were born in midwinter?”

“No,” said Harry, “I was born in July.”

Draco made little effort to hide his laughter in his sleeve.

Half an hour later, each of them had been given a complicated circular chart, and was attempting to fill in the position of the planets at their moment of birth. It was dull work, requiring much consultation of timetables and calculation of angles.

“I’ve got two Neptunes here,” said Harry after a while, frowning down at his piece of parchment, “that can’t be right, can it?”

Draco gave him a scathing look. “Not unless you know someone who can cast the Gemino Curse on a much larger scale than usual, no.”

Harry laughed, earning himself a glare from Millicent Bulstrode, but just then Crabbe drew everyone's attention his way by saying loudly, “Look, Greg, look—it’s Uranus! Get it? Uranus?”

Half of the class groaned while the rest broke into laughter, spoiling what was left of the room’s mystical atmosphere. It was this, perhaps, that made Professor Trelawney give them so much homework at the end of class.

“A detailed analysis of the way the planetary movements in the coming month will affect you, with reference to your personal chart,” she snapped, sounding much more like Professor McGonagall than her usual airy-fairy self. “I want it ready to hand in next Monday, and no excuses!”

“Look what you did!” Draco complained as they joined the crowds filing into the hallways between classes. He shoved Crabbe hard in the side. This had no real effect on the bulkier boy, but he hunched his shoulders and mumbled something apologetic anyway. “Next time _whisper_ , dummy. You know what that is? Talking quietly, yes?” Draco shook his head, disgusted, as Crabbe nodded. “Well, don’t think I'm going to help you sort out this assignment,” he said haughtily. “You brought this one on yourself, so you’re on your own.”

“Sorry,” Crabbe said. “Just thought it was funny….”

Draco rolled his eyes and moved to walk in front of the others.

Pansy Parkinson hurried over to join them for the walk down to Care of Magical Creatures. She was a short, perky girl with heavy-lidded eyes and an upturned nose. She also had an unfortunate habit of talking louder than she needed to, so Harry had no trouble overhearing when she squealed to Draco, “Tell me you didn’t really share a train compartment with _Hermione Granger_ on the way to school!”

“Not on purpose,” Draco retorted. “Talk to Potter. He’s the one who thinks she’s _interesting_.”

Pansy turned to look at Harry, wrinkling her nose in dismay. “Seriously?” she asked. “You’re _still_ hanging around her?”

Harry rolled his eyes. “It’s not a big deal,” he said. He wasn’t about to share the story of their being caught under the Dark Mark at the Quidditch World Cup with Pansy. She could spread the most boring rumors imaginable in an afternoon; he would hate to see what she could do with something that interesting. “Being friends with one Gryffindor doesn’t mean I’ve become disloyal to our House,” Harry insisted.

Pansy shook her head and turned her back on him. “I thought better of you, Potter,” she said, and flounced off to walk with Daphne and Millicent instead.

“Well done,” Draco told him.

Harry rolled his eyes again. “Like I care what Parkinson thinks about me,” he sneered, telling himself not to worry. If he could survive once having three-quarters of the school convinced that he was unleashing a deadly monster on his fellow students when no one was looking, his reputation could handle whatever Pansy Parkinson threw at it.

He was a lot more worried about whatever monster Hagrid had found for their first lesson.

The Slytherins trooped outside and down the sloping lawn toward Hagrid’s small wooden cabin, which stood on the edge of the Forbidden Forest.

Hagrid was standing outside his hut, one hand on the collar of his enormous black boarhound, Fang. There were several open wooden crates on the ground at his feet, and Fang was whimpering and straining at his collar, apparently keen to investigate the contents more closely. As they drew nearer, an odd rattling noise reached their ears, punctuated by what sounded like minor explosions.

The Gryffindors were already gathered around, some of them peering into the crates and others drawing back in fear or disgust.

 “On’y jus’ hatched,” Hagrid was saying as Harry and his friends walked up, “so yeh’ll be able ter raise ‘em yerselves! Thought we’d make a bit of a project of it!”

“And why would we _want_ to raise them?” Draco asked in a cold voice. Crabbe and Goyle chuckled appreciatively and even Harry, peering into the crates, had to admit that his friend had a point, although he wouldn’t say as much to Hagrid. The creatures inside looked like deformed, shell-less lobsters, horribly pale and slimy looking, with legs sticking out in very odd places and no visible heads. There were about a hundred of them in each crate, each about six inches long, crawling over one another, bumping blindly into the sides of the boxes. They were giving off a very powerful smell of rotting fish. Every now and then, sparks would fly out of the end of one, and with a small _phut_ , it would be propelled forward several inches. As Draco had pointed-out, they did not look like most people’s ideas of a desirable pet.

Hagrid looked stumped at Draco’s question.

“I mean, what do they _do?_ ” asked Draco, with the terse patience he usually reserved for explaining simple homework assignments to Crabbe or Goyle. “What is the _point_ of them?”

Hagrid opened his mouth, apparently thinking hard; there was a few seconds’ pause, then he said roughly, “Tha’s next lesson, Malfoy. Yer jus’ feedin’ ‘em today. Now, yeh’ll wan’ ter try ‘em on a few diff’rent things—I’ve never had ‘em before, not sure what they’ll go fer—I got ant eggs an’ frog livers an’ a bit o’ grass snake—just try ‘em out with a bit of each.”

“So glad we’ve got his professional expertise to rely on,” Draco muttered, but he did it quietly enough that Hagrid didn’t overhear, so Harry ignored him.

Nothing but deep affection for Hagrid could have made him pick up squelchy handfuls of frog liver and lower them into the crates to tempt the ugly creatures—Blast-Ended Skrewts, Hagrid called them, when Theodore Nott asked if they had a name. Harry couldn’t suppress the suspicion that the whole thing was entirely pointless, because the skrewts didn’t seem to have mouths. Crabbe and Goyle at least were enjoying themselves, pointing and laughing each time one of the skrewts shot forward, and picking up great handfuls of the disgusting food, half of which they tried to feed to the skrewts and half of which they chucked at each other instead.

The only other people who seemed to be happy about the lesson were Ron Weasley, Seamus Finnigan, and Dean Thomas; ever since Seamus had been savaged by a hippogriff in Hagrid’s first lesson last year, the three Gryffindor boys had been devoted to the large teacher and his dangerous lessons. Harry didn’t understand it—while he liked Hagrid, he would have happily traded every one of his Care of Magical Creatures classes for book-based lessons—but since their enthusiasm meant that one of them sometimes took Harry’s place as Hagrid’s favorite volunteer, he wasn’t going to complain.

Ever Hermione, ordinarily the first to have her hand up, didn’t look happy to be studying the skrewts, and Pansy had refused to touch them at all. Harry couldn’t blame her, and wished that he could get away with doing the same.

 _“Ouch!”_ yelled Dean Thomas, the tallest of the Gryffindor boys, after about ten minutes. “It got me!”

Hagrid hurried over to him, looking anxious.

“Its end exploded!” said Thomas indignantly, showing Hagrid a burn on his hand.

“Ah, yeah, that can happen when they blast off,” said Hagrid, nodding.

“Eurgh!” said Lavender Brown, another Gryffindor. “Eurgh, Hagrid, what’s the pointy thing on it?”

“Ah, some of ‘em have got stings,” said Hagrid enthusiastically (Brown quickly withdrew her hand from the box). “I reckon they’re the males…. The females’ve got sorta sucker things on their bellies…. I think they might be ter suck blood.”

“Well, I can certainly see why we’re trying to keep them alive,” said Draco sarcastically. “Who wouldn’t want pets that can burn, sting, and bite all at once?”

Crabbe’s dark eyes lit up. “That does sound fun,” he said. Draco rolled his eyes.

“Until it burns, stings, or bites _you_ ,” he retorted.

Harry glanced at Hagrid, who didn’t seem worried about the prospect of injury. If the skrewts burnt, stung, or bit him, he would probably just coo about how talented they were. Hagrid simply loved monstrous creatures, the more lethal, the better.

“I like ‘em,” Goyle declared, too busy poking at the skrewts to notice Draco glaring at him.

Unfortunately Draco was too busy glaring at Goyle to notice that one of the skrewts had gotten out of its crate until it blasted across his shoe. He shrieked and kicked out wildly, sending the skrewt flying one way while he fell the other, knocking into Pansy and sending them both tumbling to the ground.

Almost everyone laughed, except for Millicent, who ran forward to haul her friend back to her feet. The Gryffindors laughed loudest of all, of course. When Draco lurched upright he rounded on the nearest—Finnigan—and shook his finger angrily in the shorter boy’s face. “You put that thing there on purpose!” he snarled.

“Who, me?” Finnigan asked innocently. His friends dissolved in more laughter, Ron chortling so hard he had to hang onto Neville Longbottom’s shoulders to keep from falling over into the crate of skrewts. Draco scowled at them and furiously brushed at his robes. “You’ll be sorry,” he muttered. “Just you wait….”

Ron made a rude gesture that earned him a scolding from Hermione. The other Gryffindors ignored him.

When class finally ended an hour later, neither Harry nor his friends had gotten stung or badly burned, although there was still grass on Draco’s robes and Crabbe had a few blistered knuckles. He wasn’t about to delay going to lunch to get them tended, though, and since he had once had his whole arm lit on fire by a salamander, Harry figured that he was experienced enough to know whether or not he needed to see Madam Pomfrey for his burns.

“They were kinda small,” Goyle observed as they made their way back up to the castle. “It’d be easy to lose one, I bet.” Harry looked over worriedly, but Goyle’s hands and pockets both seemed to be empty. He made a mental note to suggest to Hagrid that he count the skrewts before and after each lesson—just in case.

“Just wait,” Draco said darkly, “as soon as that idiot figures out what those monsters eat, they’ll probably be seven feet long, or worse.”

“Hagrid’s not an idiot,” Harry retorted. “He just…really likes weird animals.”

Draco snorted. “Right,” he said, “whether or not he actually knows anything about them. Honestly, what kind of a teacher presents a ‘lesson’ without bothering to figure out what the subject does, first?”

Hermione Granger, waking a little ways in front of them with some of her fellow Gryffindors, turned around. “For once I have to agree with you, Malfoy,” she said loftily. “And do you know, I couldn’t find a single entry on Blast-Ended Skrewts anywhere in _The Monster Book of Monsters?_ I don’t know where Professor Hagrid got them from, but I don’t think they’re part of the approved curriculum.”

Draco frowned, and Harry held his breath, afraid that Draco would take out his bad temper with her housemates on Hermione—but then he gave a grudging nod. “How did you find out about today’s lesson far enough in advance to check the book?” he asked.

“Oh I didn’t,” Hermione shook her head, “I just looked after Professor Hagrid told us what they were called. I wanted to find out if they had some sort of use or purpose. I mean, a lot of really awful creatures do have some wonderful, useful aspects. Dragons, for instance—you’d be mad to want to get close to one, but their blood is incredibly magical—”

“No kidding, even Crabbe knows that,” Draco said scathingly, ignoring the scowl that Crabbe shot at him. He fell into step next to Hermione and asked, “So, what kind of fantastic purpose do the skrewts have to make up for how wretched they are?”

“I told you,” Hermione shook her head again, “they aren’t even mentioned in the book. And I can’t imagine what kind of good they could possibly do anyone. The best thing to do would probably be to stamp on the lot of them before they start attacking us all.”

Draco laughed. “You make a good point for once, Granger,” he said.

Harry would have been pleased to see his friends getting along for a change, if only they hadn’t been doing it at Hagrid’s expense. He was relieved when they finally reached the Great Hall and had to separate from Hermione. She crossed to the far side of the hall while Harry, Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle sat down at the Slytherin table and helped themselves to lamb chops and potatoes.

Draco didn’t eat much, being more concerned with picking grass off his robe than filling his plate, but Crabbe and Goyle more than made up for his lack of appetite.

Harry waited until they had taken the edge off their hunger before he said, “So, you really think Finnigan sicced that skrewt on you on purpose?”

“Well the thing didn’t climb out of that crate on its own,” Draco retorted nastily, “but no—my money’s on Weasley. He was the one laughing hardest.”

Harry frowned. “Yeah,” he agreed slowly, “but he wasn’t even working at the same crate we were, was he?”

Draco shrugged. “So what? It’s not like Hagrid actually pays attention to what anyone is doing in his ‘lessons.’ Weasley could have easily sneaked around behind us without being spotted. I bet he thought it would be real funny to get my leg blown off, get me back for what I said about his horrible old dress robes….”

“Oh come on,” said Harry, “blow your leg off? It barely even scorched your shoe. The skrewts will have to get a _lot_ bigger than they are now, if they’re going to start taking off limbs.”

“Like I said,” Draco said darkly, “just give Hagrid time….”

When the bell rang to signal the start of afternoon lessons, it was back outside for the Slytherins. They trudged across the sodden vegetable patch until they arrived in greenhouse three, where Professor Sprout showed the class the ugliest plants Harry had ever seen. Indeed, they looked less like plants than thick, black, giant slugs, protruding vertically out of the soil. Each was squirming slightly and had a number of large, shiny swellings on it, which appeared to be full of liquid.

“Bubotubers,” Professor Sprout told them briskly. “They need squeezing. You will collect the pus—”

“The _what_?” gasped Pansy, sounding horrified.

“Pus, Parkinson, pus,” said Professor Sprout, “and it’s extremely valuable, so don’t waste it. You will collect the pus, I say, in these bottles. Wear your dragon-hide gloves; it can do funny things to the skin when undiluted, bubotuber pus.”

“First blast-ended skrewts, now bubotuber pus,” Draco muttered. “This year is off to a terrible start. I shudder to think what’s going to be next.”

Harry laughed and made sure his dragon-hide gloves were on securely.

Squeezing the bubotubers was disgusting, but oddly satisfying. As each swelling was popped, a large amount of thick yellowish-green liquid burst forth, which smelled strongly of petrol. They caught it in the bottles as Professor Sprout had indicated, and by the end of the lesson had collected several pints.

“This’ll keep Madam Pomfrey happy,” said Professor Spout, stoppering the last bottle with a cork. “An excellent remedy for the most stubborn forms of acne, bubotuber pus. Should stop students resorting to desperate measures to rid themselves of pimples.”

“I heard a girl in Hufflepuff actually cursed her own nose off, trying to clear her skin,” said Terry Boot from Ravenclaw.

“Eloise Midgen,” Pansy confirmed with relish. No one knew more gossip than Pansy.

“Silly girl,” Professor Sprout said, shaking her head. “But Madam Pomfrey fixed her nose back on in the end.”

A booming bell echoed from the castle across the wet grounds, signaling the end of the lesson, and the class separated; the Ravenclaws descending to the dungeons for Potions, and the Slytherins climbing the main staircase up to History of Magic. That class was as uneventful as ever and Harry found himself yawning only five minutes into Professor Binns’s lecture. As the late teacher droned on and on, Harry’s eyelids slid closed.

He opened them with a jerk when he heard the unmistakable peal of Pansy’s laughter. Harry looked over his shoulder and saw her and Daphne bent over a copy of the _Daily Prophet_ that they were reading together underneath Daphne’s desk.

Professor Binns didn’t look up. Harry wondered what it would take to get his attention if somebody actually wanted to.

It felt like hours later that they were finally dismissed. Together he and Draco shook Crabbe and Goyle awake and they joined the crowds descending the staircases back to the Great Hall and dinner.

“At least we didn’t get much homework aside from Trelawney’s,” Harry said brightly, his mind wandering outside to the school’s empty Quidditch pitch. He turned around to suggest some early flying practice to Draco, but he was deep in conversation with Pansy and Daphne, all three of them now whispering together over something in the _Daily Prophet_.

Harry rolled his eyes at the gossips and turned back around.

They reached the entrance hall, which was packed with people queuing for dinner. They had almost caught up to the end of the line when Draco shouted loudly, “Weasley! Hey, Weasley!”

Ron was standing at the back of the line with his fellow Gryffindor fourth years. He turned around when he heard Draco call his name.

“What?” said Ron shortly, his eyes darting between Harry and Draco. Harry shrugged helplessly, having no idea what Draco wanted. He noticed that Pansy and Daphne had stepped away from him and were watching the scene with their hands over their mouths, restraining giggles. Harry sidled toward the girls, meaning to ask them what was going on, but before he could, Draco brandished the copy of the _Daily Prophet_ he had gotten from Pansy and said, “Your dad’s in the paper, Weasley!” He spoke very loudly, so that everyone in the packed entrance hall could hear. “Listen to this!

**FURTHER MISTAKES AT THE MINISTRY OF MAGIC**

> It seems as though the Ministry of Magic’s troubles are not yet at an end, _writes Rita Skeeter, Special Correspondent._ Recently under fire for its poor crowd control at the Quidditch World Cup, and still unable to account for the disappearance of one of its witches, the Ministry was plunged into fresh embarrassment yesterday by the antics of Arnold Weasley, of the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office.”

Draco looked up.

“Imagine them not even getting his name right, Weasley. It’s almost as though he’s a complete nonentity, isn’t it?” he crowed.

Harry groaned, immediately seeing where this was going. Everyone in the entrance hall was listening now. Draco straightened the paper with a flourish and read on:

> Arnold Weasley, the figurehead of his somewhat dubiously-useful department, was yesterday involved in a tussle with several Muggle law-keepers (“policemen”) over a number of highly aggressive dustbins. Mr. Weasley appears to have rushed to the aid of “Mad-Eye” Moody, the aged ex-Auror who retired from the Ministry when no longer able to tell the difference between a handshake and attempted murder.
> 
> Unsurprisingly, Mr. Weasley found, upon arrival at Mr. Moody’s heavily guarded house, that Mr. Moody had once again raised a false alarm. Mr. Weasley was forced to modify several memories before he could escape from the policemen, but refused to answer _Daily Prophet_ questions about why he had involved the Ministry in such an undignified and potentially embarrassing scene.

“And there’s a picture, Weasley!” said Draco, flipping the paper over and holding it up. “A picture of your parents outside their house—if you can call it a house! Your mother could do with losing a bit of weight, couldn’t she?”

Ron was shaking with fury. Everyone was staring at him except for Harry, who was gaping slack-jawed at Draco. Insulting someone’s mum was, in Harry’s opinion, a bit out of proportion in retaliation for having a shoe scorched.

“Why do you always have to be so horrible to people?” Hermione demanded shrilly, shoving her way through the crowd so she could glower at Draco. “Is it compensation for something, or are you just naturally nasty?” Harry was glad he was standing next to Pansy and Daphne instead of beside his friend; with luck, maybe Hermione wouldn’t think to blame him for Draco’s underhanded tactics.

Draco’s pale face went slightly pink. “I’m only horrible when people deserve it,” he retorted, raising his chin higher. “Of course, you were staying with them this summer, weren’t you, Granger?” he sneered. “So I suppose you’d feel you had to be loyal, after they went to the effort of taking you to the World Cup and everything, right?”

Hermione’s cheeks went much pinker than Draco’s. “Nobody has to _buy_ my friendship!” she snapped.

“Good thing,” Draco sneered, “because Weasley wouldn’t be able to afford if even if he sold that dungpile he lives in. Tell me Weasley, why didn’t your mother come along to the World Cup with the rest of your family? I know mine had a _marvelous_ time.” He smirked. “Was yours afraid that she wouldn’t be able to fit in the seats, or was she just afraid that if she left your house unattended that long it would fall down?”

“Your mother can go suck an elf!” Ron roared. He half-launched himself forward; only Hermione hauling desperately on his arm preventing him from charging at Draco. He hadn’t thought to draw his wand, Harry noticed, but then again he probably didn’t need it; from the look on Ron’s face, he was ready to pound Draco into paste with his bare hands, and not even Crabbe and Goyle were going to stop him.

“Don’t you dare talk about my mother like that, Weasley!”

“Keep your filthy mouth shut about mine, then!” snarled Ron, shouting over Hermione’s shrill attempts to calm him. “At least my mum’s never been arrested, eh?” he added, punctuating the words with a rude gesture before finally letting Hermione drag him back into line.

BANG!

Several people screamed—Harry didn’t understand what he was seeing at first, even after he saw the wand in Draco’s hand—the students standing in line near Ron had scattered, diving away from whatever spell Draco had cast—Ron reached into his robes for his own wand—Hermione was hanging off his arm, screaming about not breaking any rules—Harry started forward to join Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle, reaching anxiously for his own wand—but before the fight could start properly, he heard a second loud BANG, and a roar that echoed through the entrance hall.

“OH NO YOU DON’T, LADDIE!”

Harry spun around. Professor Moody was limping down the marble staircase. His wand was out and it was pointing right at a pure white ferret, which was shivering on the stone-flagged floor, exactly where Draco had been standing.

There was a terrified silence in the entrance hall. Nobody but Moody was moving a muscle.

“Stand back there, Potter,” he said without turning to look at Harry, who didn’t bother to argue or ask how Moody knew his name; he had gotten used to being recognized in the Wizarding World by now, and he wasn’t about to argue with anyone who could turn his best friend into a ferret that easily. He slunk backwards toward the edges of the staring crowd.

Moody turned to look at Ron—at least, his normal eye was looking at Ron; the other one was pointing into the back of his head.

“Did he get you?” Moody growled. His voice was low and gravelly.

Ron shook his head dumbly, mouth hanging open.

“LEAVE IT!” Moody shouted.

Ron jumped. “Leave—what?” he yelped, bewildered.

“Not you—him!” Moody growled, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at Crabbe, who had just frozen, about to pick up the white ferret. It seemed that Moody’s rolling eye was magical and could see out of the back of his head.

Moody started to limp toward Crabbe, Goyle, and the ferret, which gave a terrified squeak and took off, streaking toward the dungeons.

“I don’t think so!” roared Moody, pointing his wand at the ferret again—it flew ten feet into the air, fell with a smack to the floor, and then bounced upward once more.

“I don’t like people who attack when their opponent’s back’s turned,” growled Moody as the ferret bounced higher and higher, squealing in pain. “Stinking, cowardly, scummy thing to do….”

The ferret flew through the air, its legs and tail flailing helplessly. Harry cast his mind about wildly for something to do, but he came up as blank as the horrified expressions on Crabbe and Goyle’s faces.

“Never—do—that—again—” said Moody, speaking each word as the ferret hit the stone floor and bounced upward again.

“Professor Moody!” said a shocked voice.

Professor McGonagall was coming down the marble staircase with her arms full of books.

“Hello, Professor McGonagall,” said Moody calmly, bouncing the ferret still higher.

“What—what are you doing?” said Professor McGonagall, her eyes following the bouncing ferret’s progress through the air.

“Teaching,” said Moody.

“Teach—Moody, _is that a student?”_ shrieked Professor McGonagall, the books spilling out of her arms.

“Yep,” said Moody.

“No!” cried Professor McGonagall, running down the stairs and pulling out her wand; a moment later, with a loud snapping noise, Draco Malfoy had reappeared, lying in a heap on the floor with his sleek blond hair all over his now brilliantly pink face. He got to his feet, wincing.

“Moody, we _never_ use Transfiguration as a punishment!” said Professor McGonagall weakly. “Surely Professor Dumbledore told you that?”

“He might’ve mentioned it, yeah,” said Moody, scratching his chin unconcernedly, “but I thought a good sharp shock—”

“We give detentions, Moody! Or speak to the offender’s Head of House!”

“I’ll do that, then,” said Moody, staring at Draco with great dislike.

Draco, whose pale eyes were still watering with pain and humiliation, looked malevolently up at Moody and muttered something in which the words “my father” were distinguishable.

“Oh yeah?” said Moody quietly, limping forward a few steps, the dull _clunk_ of his wooden leg echoing around the hall. “Well, I know your father of old, boy…. You tell him Moody’s keeping a close eye on his son…you tell him that from me…. Now, your Head of House’ll be Snape, will it?”

“Yes,” said Draco resentfully.

“Another old friend,” growled Moody. “I’ve been looking forward to a chat with old Snape…. Come on, you….”

And he seized Draco’s upper arm and marched him off toward the dungeons.

Professor McGonagall stared anxiously after them for a few moments, then waved her wand at her fallen books, causing them to soar up into the air and back into her arms.

Harry, Crabbe, and Goyle stared at one another mutely, not moving.

“Should—should we—?” Goyle asked eventually, gesturing in the direction of the dungeons.

Harry and Crabbe shook their heads almost in unison. “No,” said Harry, suppressing a shudder, “no that’s a bad idea.” He wasn’t sure what scared him more: Snape’s inevitable wrath at seeing his favorite student so mistreated, Draco’s fury over being publicly humiliated, or Moody himself. He couldn’t stop thinking about what Moody had done to Mrs. Malfoy’s cousin.

“Let’s just…go into dinner. Draco will find us when he’s…when he’s done.”

The other two nodded and they walked into the Great Hall together, without speaking. They sat down at the Slytherin table a few minutes later, surrounded by excited and horrified talk on all sides about what had just happened.

“—like he doesn’t even _care_ about rules!” Tracey Davis was saying. She looked torn between admiration and terror.

“Or basic decency,” Millicent grumbled. “Imagine, Transfiguring someone against their will….” The tall girl stabbed her fork into her shepherd’s pie so hard it split down the middle and leaked sauce all over her plate.

“It _was_ kind of funny, though,” Tracey whispered, after looking around to make sure that Pansy and Daphne weren’t in hearing distance. Millicent didn’t smile, but she didn’t contradict Tracey either.

Theodore Nott was less circumspect about sharing his opinion. “What a complete idiot,” he said. “Dueling in the entrance hall? Right before dinner? He’s lucky Moody just Transfigured him, instead of taking points. Anyone _sensible_ would have kept their mouth shut, and gotten Weasley back when no one was looking.”

“Well,” Blaise Zabini sneered, with a pointed glance at Harry, “when you spend too much time in low company, their standards of behavior are bound to rub off….”

Pansy Parkinson, meanwhile, was practically in hysterics, ranting about how Moody ought to be sacked on the spot. Daphne kept trying to shush her, but since her little sister was clutching at her other arm, sobbing about being too scared to go to Defense Against the Dark Arts class tomorrow morning, she didn’t have the attention to deal with either of them properly.

“I still think we shoulda pounded him,” Goyle muttered, cracking his knuckles.

Crabbe, dolling an enormous helping of beef casserole onto his plate, shook his head—probably the first time that Harry could remember his burly friend ever rejecting the idea of violence. He didn’t blame Crabbe; he didn’t fancy a tangle with Mad-Eye Moody either, after that display.

“Draco is going to be so mad,” Harry breathed, shaking his head as well.

“So’s Snape,” said Crabbe, and chortled.

Imagining the words that the sour Potions teacher was probably having with Moody at this very moment cheered all three of them up immensely.

“At least we haven’t got Defense until Wednesday,” Harry said. “Maybe by then, Draco will be over it.”


	11. The Unforgivable Curses

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This section contains a number of scattered excerpts taken from Chapter Fourteen, encompassing pages 209 to 227 of the American hardcover edition.

Draco did not, in fact, get over the humiliation quickly. Of course, having the story repeated across every corner of the school certainly kept it fresh in his mind—and everyone else’s. Not even the intimidating presence of Crabbe and Goyle could stop people from talking and laughing about the sight of Moody turning one of their classmates into a ferret and bouncing him across the entrance hall. The fact that Snape had not read Moody the riot act, as everyone in Slytherin had expected him to, didn’t help either. Harry wasn’t sure why Professor Snape had uncharacteristically restrained himself, but Snape was in one of the worst moods that Harry had ever seen, and not even getting to yell at Neville Longbottom after the hapless Gryffindor melted his sixth cauldron in Potions had seemed to cheer him up.

It was common knowledge that Snape really wanted the Dark Arts job, and he had now failed to get it for the fourth year running. Snape had disliked all of their previous Dark Arts teachers, and shown it—but he seemed strangely wary of displaying overt animosity to Mad-Eye Moody. Indeed, whenever Harry saw the two of them together—at mealtimes, or when they passed in the corridors—he had the distinct impression that Snape was avoiding Moody’s eye, whether magical or normal.

“He hardly even glared,” Draco complained for the ninth time as they sat in Transfiguration on Tuesday afternoon. “Just sat there and—and _listened_ , and murmured something about it being a shame how often adolescent boys let their temper get the better of their good manners and common sense.” His face curled up in disgust. “He didn’t tell Moody off _at all.”_

“I reckon Snape’s a bit scared of him, you know,” Harry said thoughtfully.

“So much for looking out for his students,” Draco grumbled. “I always thought he was more reliable than that, you know?”

“Well, you told me yourself Moody’s pretty scary…”

“I know,” Draco whined, “but so’s Snape! The point is having someone scary on _our side_ means we shouldn’t have to be afraid of anybody else!” He huffed in annoyance and sulked for the rest of the class while the others worked on turning their garter snakes into bell pulls.

The Slytherin fourth years were both dreading and anticipating Moody’s first lesson so much that they arrived early on Wednesday lunchtime and queued up outside his classroom before the bell had even rung. Draco skulked at the very back of the line and had ordered Crabbe and Goyle to stick close to his heels. He kept fingering his wand in his pocket and glared at anyone who tried to talk to him.

Harry was desperately afraid that Draco was going to try to Curse their teacher. Even Crabbe and Goyle seemed nervous, although they could have just been cross about being dragged away from lunch earlier than usual.

The four of them hurried into chairs at the back of the room, as far as possible from the teacher’s desk, took out their copies of _The Dark Forces: A Guide to Self-Protection_ , and waited, unusually quiet. Soon they heard Moody’s distinctive clunking footsteps coming down the corridor, and he entered the room, looking as strange and frightening as ever. They could just see his clawed, wooden foot protruding from underneath his robes.

“You can put those away,” he growled, stomping over to his desk and sitting down, “those books. You won’t be needing them.”

They returned the books to their bags, Draco going paler.

Moody took out a register, shook his long mane of grizzled hair out of his twisted and scarred face, and began to call out names, his normal eye moving steadily down the list while his magical eye swiveled around, fixing upon each student as he or she answered.

Draco’s voice, when Moody called on him, was higher than usual, but Moody didn’t seem to notice. He also made no special note of Harry’s identity, which Harry realized only belatedly; by the time it occurred to him that Moody was the first Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher—aside from Lupin, whom Harry had met for the first time after passing out on the Hogwarts Express during a dementor encounter—not to react to the name of the Boy Who Lived, he was already calling on Blaise Zabini, who reported himself present with uncharacteristic meekness.

“Right then,” Moody said, rolling up the list of students, “I’ve had a letter from Professor Lupin about this class. Seems you’ve had a pretty thorough grounding in tackling Dark creatures—you’ve covered boggarts, Red Caps, hinkypunks, grindylows, Kappas, and werewolves, is that right?”

There was a general murmur of assent.

“But you’re behind—very behind—on dealing with curses,” said Moody. “So I’m here to bring you up to scratch on what wizards can do to each other. I’ve got one year to teach you how to deal with Dark—”

“What happens at the end of the year?” Daphne Greengrass asked, sounding terrified.

Moody’s magical eye spun around to stare at Daphne; she looked extremely apprehensive, but after a moment Moody smiled—the first time Harry had seen him do so. The effect was to make his heavily scarred face look more twisted and contorted than ever, but it was nevertheless good to know that he ever did anything as friendly as smile. Daphne’s shoulders sagged, as though she was deeply relieved.

“First of all, if I’ve done my job right, you’ll all still be alive,” Moody said. Harry thought— _hoped_ —he meant that to be a joke, but nobody laughed. Moody continued, “Either way, I’m done at the end of the year. I’m here as a special favor to Dumbledore…. One year, and then back to my quiet retirement.”

He gave a harsh laugh, and then clapped his gnarled hands together.

“So—straight into it. Curses. They come in many strengths and forms. Now, according to the Ministry of Magic, I’m supposed to teach you countercurses and leave it at that. I’m not supposed to show you what illegal Dark curses look like until you’re in the sixth year. You’re not supposed to be old enough to deal with it till then. But I reckon some of you have an inkling of what kind of curses are out there already, and the rest of you deserve the same chance to figure out how to defend yourselves. Well, fortunately Professor Dumbledore’s got a higher opinion of your nerves, he reckons you can cope, and I say, the sooner you know what you’re up against, the better. A wizard who’s about to put an illegal curse on you isn’t going to tell you what he’s about to do. He’s not going to do it nice and polite to your face. You need to be prepared. You need to be alert and watchful. You need to put that away, Miss Davis, when I’m talking.”

Tracey twitched and looked up guiltily. She had been reading the textbook Moody had told them to put away under her desk; now she stuffed it hurriedly into her bag. Apparently Moody’s magical eye could see through solid wood, as well as out of the back of his head.

“Now, one interesting thing about curses,” Moody said, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his desk, “is that the Ministry reserves the right to use ‘em for themselves in extreme circumstances. Even the nastiest were temporarily added to the Aurors’ available repertoire a few years ago, so sometimes illegal curses do become legal—for the right people.” Moody gave them a toothy, horrible smile. Harry knew he was talking about the days in which You-Know-Who had been all-powerful. “There were some who cried hypocrisy of course, but they were overruled. You always have to be careful, with curses; you don’t want to turn into something just as bad as what you’re fighting against, but sometimes dark times call for dark actions….

“So…I reckon there’s a few of you in here who can tell me which curses are most heavily punished by Wizarding law?”

For a long moment, nobody moved. For once, no one seemed to want to show-off for the new teacher.

“Come, come!” cried Moody. “Professor Lupin told me this class was intelligent; don’t go making a liar out of him now!”

Eventually a hand in the front row inched up: Theodore Nott. “The…Cruciatus Curse?” he said, his voice more hesitant than it usually was when answering a teacher’s question.

“Hmm, yes, not surprised you’d know that one…. All right, we’ll start there.”

Moody got heavily to his mismatched feet, opened his desk drawer, and took out a glass jar. Three large black spiders were scuttling around inside it. “Eurgh,” Pansy muttered, then blushed when Moody’s magical eye swiveled briefly in her direction.

Moody reached into the jar, caught one of the spiders, and placed it upon the desktop, where it remained motionless, apparently too scared to move.

“The Cruciatus Curse,” said Moody. “Needs to be a bit bigger for you to get the idea,” he said, pointing his wand at the spider. _“Engorgio!”_

The spider swelled. It was now larger than a tarantula. Pansy squeaked and pushed her chair back as far as it would go but Millicent, at the desk next to hers, leaned forward eagerly.

Moody raised his wand again, pointed it at the spider, and muttered, _“Crucio!”_

At once, the spider’s legs bent in upon its body; it rolled over and began to twitch horribly, rocking from side to side. No sound came from it, but Harry was sure that if it could have given voice, it would have been screaming. Moody did not remove his wand, and the spider started to shudder and jerk more violently—

“Can we have a go at that?” Crabbe asked, breaking the horrible silence that had fallen over the class.

Moody looked up and raised his wand. The spider’s legs relaxed, but continued to twitch.

“What did I say at the start of the lesson?” he growled. “I’m not _teaching_ you how to curse people, I’m showing you these so you can figure out how to resist them. So you know what you’re up against. Not so you can go around _using_ ‘em.” The glower he cast across the classroom was terrible enough to cow even Crabbe, who hunched down in his seat and muttered to himself mutinously. Moody stared at him another moment, as if to be sure the burly boy wasn’t going to try and argue, then pointed his wand at the spider again.

 _“Reducio,”_ he muttered, and the spider shrank back to its proper size. He put it back in the jar.

“Pain,” said Moody softly. “You don’t need thumbscrews or knives to torture someone if you can perform the Cruciatus Curse…. That one was very popular in the old days. I expect many of you have heard more than a few stories about what that curse can do. Frightened a lot of people once upon a time, the threat of the Cruciatus Curse did….

“Anyone else know one? Another illegal curse?”

This time no hands went up. Moody stumped forward and paced up and down the rows of desks, his wooden leg thumping. “No one else knows any more illegal curses, eh?” he said and chortled. “Why do I have a hard time believing that…. You, Malfoy!” he barked suddenly, stopping in front of Draco’s desk.

Draco quailed back in his seat, giving the impression that if there hadn’t been a stone wall behind him, he would have pushed himself straight out of the classroom. “What?” he yelped. “I don’t know!”

Moody snorted. “Don’t give me that rubbish. Come on, boy, tell me a curse.”

For a while it seemed like Draco wasn’t going to answer. Harry held his breath, hoping that Moody wasn’t going to break any more school rules; he doubted that Professor McGonagall would be conveniently barging in the door this time if he did.

Then, just as the class was starting to fidget, Draco swallowed hard and said, “The Imperius Curse, then.” His voice was hoarse. “My—my father told me about that one….”

Moody nodded slowly. “Yes, your father _would_ know that one. Gave the Ministry a lot of trouble at one time, the Imperius Curse.” He held Draco’s eyes with both of his for a long moment; Draco looked away first.

Moody limped back to the front of the room. He reached into the jar for the next spider and held it out in the palm of his hand so that they could all see it. He then pointed his wand at it and muttered, _“Imperio!”_

The spider leapt from Moody’s hand on a fine thread of silk and began to swing backward and forward as though on a trapeze. It stretched out its legs rigidly, then did a back flip, breaking the thread and landing on the desk, where it began to cartwheel in circles. Moody jerked his wand, and the spider rose onto two of its hind legs and went into what was unmistakably a tap dance.

A few people—Crabbe, Goyle, Lilian, and Tracey—were laughing, but most of the class was silent, watching the spider with wary eyes. Harry laughed until he realized that Moody wasn’t laughing either.

“Think it’s funny, do you?” he growled. “You’d like it, would you, if I did it to you?”

What little laughter there was died away almost instantly.

“Total control,” said Moody quietly as the spider balled itself up and began to roll over and over. “I could make it jump out of the window, drown itself, throw itself down one of your throats…”

Goyle perked-up, probably excited at the prospect of a snack.

“Years back, there were a lot of witches and wizards being controlled by the Imperius Curse,” said Moody. “It made a good cover for those who didn’t want to own-up to their own actions, too. Some job for the Ministry, trying to sort out who was being forced to act, and who was acting of their own free will. We’ll probably never know if they got them all, or if there’s some liars still out there hiding behind the excuse of being Imperiused….” His magical eye was roaming the classroom again, and none of the students were willing to meet his gaze, least of all Draco, who was now staring fixedly out the window. Harry wasn’t sure if he had even watched the spider’s dance. He didn’t turn back when Moody started talking again, although the rest of the class was glancing nervously between the spider and their grizzled teacher.

“The Imperius Curse can be fought, and I’ll be teaching you how, but it takes real strength of character, and not everyone’s got it. Better avoid being hit with it if you can. CONSTANT VIGILANCE!” he barked, and everyone jumped. Daphne shrieked and Draco actually lurched all the way to his feet. His face was burning when he sat back down, and Harry carefully avoided looking at him.

Moody picked up the somersaulting spider and threw it back into the jar.

“Right…anyone know any others?”

Harry looked around. From the looks on everyone’s faces, he guessed they weren’t about to offer an answer even if Moody turned one of those curses on them. “I’m waiting for an answer,” Moody growled. “Hurry up.”

After a long, long pause, Tracey Davis’s hand drifted into the air. “Are you talking about _Av—Avada Kedavra,_ sir?” she asked hesitantly.

“Ah,” said Moody, another slight smile twisting his lopsided mouth. “Yes, the last and worst. _Avada Kedavra_ …the Killing Curse.”

He put his hand into the glass jar, and almost as though it knew what was coming, the third spider scuttled frantically around the bottom of the jar, trying to evade Moody’s fingers, but he trapped it, and placed it upon the desktop. It started to scuttle frantically across the wooden surface.

Moody raised his wand, and Harry felt a sudden thrill of foreboding.

 _“Avada Kedavra!”_ Moody roared.

There was a flash of blinding green light and a rushing sound, as though a vast, invisible something was soaring through the air—instantaneously the spider rolled over onto its back, unmarked, but unmistakably dead. Several of the students stifled cries; Daphne had flung her arms over her head and Lilian Moon had crouched down to hide behind her desk, and was now peeking curiously over the top. Theodore Nott was leaning forward for a better view and even Draco looked intrigued despite himself.

Moody swept the dead spider off the desk onto the floor.

“Not nice,” he said calmly. “Not pleasant. And there’s no countercurse. There’s no blocking it. Only one known person has ever survived it, and he’s sitting in the back of this classroom.”

Harry felt his face redden as Moody’s eyes (both of them) looked into his own. Out of the corner of his eyes he could see everyone else turning around to look at him too. Harry stared at the blank blackboard as though fascinated by it, but not really seeing it at all….

So that was how his parents had died…exactly like that spider. Had they been unblemished and unmarked too? Had they simply seen the flash of green light and heard the rush of speeding death, before life was wiped from their bodies?

Harry had been picturing his parents’ deaths over and over again for three years now, ever since he’d found out they had been murdered, ever since he’d found out what had happened that night: Wormtail had betrayed his parents’ whereabouts to Lord Voldemort who had come to find them at their cottage. How the Dark Lord had killed Harry’s father first. How James Potter had tried to hold him off, while he shouted at his wife to take Harry and run…Voldemort had advanced on Lily Potter, told her to move aside so that he could kill Harry…how she had begged him to kill her instead, refused to stop shielding her son…and so the Dark Lord had murdered her too, before turning his wand on Harry….

Harry knew these details because he had heard his parents’ voices when he had fought the dementors last year—for that was the terrible power of the dementors: to force their victims to relive the worst memories of their lives, and drown, powerless, in their own despair….

Moody was speaking again, from a great distance, it seemed to Harry. With a massive effort, he pulled himself back to the present and listened to what Moody was saying.

 _“Avada Kedavra’s_ a curse that needs a powerful bit of magic behind it—you could all get your wands out now and point them at me and say the words, and I doubt I’d get so much as a nosebleed.”

“Bet me you would,” Draco muttered under his breath, and Harry tensed.

Fortunately Moody hadn’t heard; he continued, saying, “But that doesn’t matter. I’m not here to teach you how to do it.” His magical eye flicked toward Crabbe, who sagged with renewed disappointment.

“Now, if there’s no countercurse, why am I showing you? _Because you’ve got to know_. You’ve got to appreciate what the worst is. You don’t want to find yourself in a situation where you’re facing it. CONSTANT VIGILANCE!” he roared, and the whole class jumped again.

“Now…those three curses— _Avada Kedavra_ , Imperius, and Cruciatus—are known as the Unforgivable Curses. The use of any one of them on a fellow human being—without Ministry approval, that is,” he added with a twisted smile, “is enough to earn a life sentence in Azkaban. That’s what you’re up against. That’s what I’ve got to teach you to fight. You need preparing. You need arming. You need understanding of what you’ll face, on all sides. But most of all, you need to practice _constant, never-ceasing vigilance_. Get out your quills…copy this down….”

They spent the rest of the lesson taking notes on each of the Unforgivable Curses. No one spoke until the bell rang—but when Moody had dismissed them and they had left the classroom, a torrent of talk burst forth. Most people were discussing the curses in awed voices—“Did you see it twitch?” “—and when he killed it—just like that!”

They were talking about the lesson, Harry thought, as though it had been some sort of spectacular show, but he hadn’t found it very entertaining—and nor, it seemed, had Draco.

“You’d think he was just waiting for an excuse to use them on one of us,” he said bitterly. “Did you hear him going on and on about how the Ministry gave their Aurors _carte blanche_ to use the Unforgivable Curses on people during the war? How many folks do you think he killed or tortured? And now he’s supposed to be our _teacher?_ It’s absurd! He’s a menace! Wait until my father hears that he showed us Unforgivables in class….”

Harry nodded distractedly. “Yeah,” he said. “A menace, all right.”

“I thought it was cool,” Crabbe muttered, but he shut-up when Draco spun around to glare at him.

“Weren’t you _listening?_ ” he hissed. “Were you too busy watching the spiders to listen to what he was saying, and to _whom?”_

“Huh?” said Crabbe.

“Never mind,” Draco snapped, rolling his eyes in disgust. “You heard him, didn’t you Harry? You saw how much he liked doing it, how much he enjoyed scaring us, threatening us?”

“Oh yeah,” Harry nodded, “right, yeah. I saw. He was…something else, all right.”

“He makes me miss the werewolf,” Draco grumbled.

Harry, who had quite liked Professor Lupin, couldn’t argue with that.

He might have said more, but an odd clunking noise sounded behind them, and they turned to see Professor Moody limping toward them. All four of them fell silent, watching him apprehensively, and Draco stepped quickly behind Goyle. Moody’s magical eye passed across the four of them and something like shock, or maybe annoyance, flicked across his scarred face, but it was gone too quickly for Harry to tell which. Moody turned his magical eye upon Harry. When he spoke, it was in a much lower and gentler growl than they had yet heard.

 “You all right, are you, Potter?”

“Yes,” said Harry, almost defiantly.

Moody’s blue eye quivered slightly in its socket as it surveyed Harry.

“And the rest of you?”

Crabbe and Goyle both grunted, Crabbe nodding enthusiastically, his eyes still alight.

Draco’s eyes went wide, then narrowed sharply. “We’re all fine… _professor_ ,” he said, glowering.

Moody nodded, then he said, more to Harry than the others it seemed, “You’ve got to know. It seems harsh, maybe, _but you’ve got to know_. No point pretending…well…the four of you all know better, eh? What your families went through…it shouldn’t be any surprise to _you_ what’s out there. Best be ready to fight it….”

“I’m ready to fight,” Crabbe said. He cracked his knuckles in preparation.

To the surprise of all of them, Moody let out a harsh bark of laughter. “Good lad,” he said, and clapped Crabbe briefly on the shoulder with one gnarled hand. “Good to have brave friends in your corner, eh?” he said.

He seemed to be asking Harry, so Harry nodded. “Yeah,” he said.

For a moment they stood there in strained silence. Then Moody said, “Well then.” He turned and clumped away, the four boys watching him warily.

“What was that about?” Harry asked, after he thought Moody was safely out of hearing.

“No idea.” Draco shook his head. “‘You’ve got to know,’” he said, lowering his high voice in a shabby impersonation of Moody’s trademark growl. “‘Best be ready to fight it…’ Huh! So far the only thing he’s shown us that we need to be afraid of is _him!_ ”

Harry knew that Draco was thinking about his time as a ferret, but Harry pictured the dead spider and the flash of green light. “He sure has,” he agreed, and shivered.

“Still…pretty cool stuff, right?” Crabbe asked hopefully. “The spells, I mean. I liked the one that made the spider squirm, an’ the one that made the spider dance, an’ the one that made the spider—”

Draco trod on his foot. “Shut-up!” he hissed, glancing at Harry pointedly.

Crabbe frowned. “How come?” he whined. “Didn’t you think it was cool?”

“I did not,” said Draco primly, which Harry thought probably had more to do with the teacher himself than with what he had shown them; esoteric and forbidden magic like that would ordinarily have captivated Draco. Harry didn’t point this out; he appreciated having Draco on his side about Moody’s lesson, even if it wasn’t for the same reasons.

“Let’s get to dinner, shall we?” Harry suggested.

Crabbe instantly lost interest in the lesson and took the lead, walking fast. No one else spoke again until they reached the Great Hall, where Crabbe and Goyle made a beeline for the food. Harry ate slowly, lost in thought. As the others were starting in on their deserts, he turned to Draco and said, “I expect Moody and Dumbledore would be in trouble with the Ministry if they knew we’d seen the curses, wouldn’t they?”

Draco looked up from his blancmange, startled. “Oh—yes, possibly,” he said. “Although I’m afraid Mr. Fudge is rather besotted with Dumbledore, lets him get away with far more than he should….”

“Are you going to tell your dad?” Harry asked. He had been cautious about mentioning Mr. Malfoy this week; he wasn’t sure if Draco had told him about the incident with Moody and the ferret yet. Draco had been brutally disappointed in Snape’s lack of retribution on his behalf, true, but while Mr. Malfoy was unlikely to be equally reticent in expressing his wrath, tattling to his dad would also mean confessing to the humiliation of being turned into a ferret in front of half the student body. Harry had a feeling that all threats to the contrary, Draco wasn’t ready to admit that to his parents, especially his father, whom he idolized.

As he had suspected, Draco did not answer right away. His lips thinned and his brows drew low over his pale eyes. After several minutes of pushing his blancmange around on his plate, he said, “I suppose I had better…but I’m not sure that father will want to share the story with anyone at the Ministry.” He looked up and met Harry’s eyes guiltily for a moment, then looked quickly away again. “I mean—he wouldn’t want to do anything that might jeopardize the case with Sirius, right? And telling tales on Dumbledore—well, like I said, the man has several highly-placed people in the Ministry in his pocket, so that could get messy.” He cleared his throat. “Bad timing, you know?”

Harry nodded. “That makes sense,” he said. “Uhh—I really appreciate what he’s doing for Sirius, by the way.”

Draco shrugged. “Oh, well, of course,” he said absently. “What are friends for?”

“Punching people for you, according to Moody,” Crabbe muttered, and snickered to himself through a mouthful of spotted dick.

The others ignored him.

 

Friday morning when they walked in to breakfast, Harry stopped dead at the sight of the Slytherin table: partway down, where Harry and his friends usually sat, a snowy owl was waiting for him. Hedwig strutted back and forth impatiently, ignoring the two second year girls trying to tempt her into eating their bacon.

Harry raced over, for once reaching the table before Crabbe and Goyle, although he didn’t reach for the food but rather for the grubby piece of parchment tied to Hedwig’s leg.

Harry hastily untied it and sat down to read, whereupon Hedwig fluttered onto his knee, hooting softly.

“What does it say?” Draco hissed, glancing nervously around at their housemates. No one seemed to be paying them much attention; it was strange for Hedwig to have arrived so much in advance of the other owls, who usually delivered their mail closer to the end of breakfast, but she was still just another owl with just another letter, to them. They didn’t know that she was carrying a message from a wrongly-convicted mass murderer.

The letter was very short, and looked as though it had been scrawled in a great hurry. Harry read it through twice, then handed it silently to Draco.

> _Harry—_
> 
> _I’m flying north immediately. This news about your scar is the latest in a series of strange rumors that have reached me here. If it hurts again, go straight to Dumbledore—they’re saying he’s got Mad-Eye out of retirement, which means he’s reading the signs, even if no one else is._
> 
> _I’ll be in touch soon. My best to your friends. Keep your eyes open, Harry._
> 
> _Sirius_

Draco looked up at him. “Flying north as in _coming back?”_ he asked. “Is he mental? Unless he means he’s finally going to turn himself in—but what’s this about ‘reading the signs?’ What signs? And what does he know about Moody? Are they—Harry? What is it?”

For Harry had just hit himself in the forehead with his fist, jolting Hedwig out of his lap.

“I shouldn’t have told him!” Harry said furiously.

“What are you talking about? Why not?” said Draco in surprise.

“It’s made him think he’s got to come back!” said Harry, now slamming his fist on the table so that Hedwig landed on Goyle’s shoulder, hooting indignantly. Several people turned to stare curiously but Harry ignored them, as well as Draco’s attempts to hush him. “Coming back, because he thinks I’m in trouble! And there’s nothing wrong with me! And don’t look at me like that, there’s plenty of food on the table if you’re hungry,” Harry snapped at Hedwig, who was clicking her beak expectantly.

Hedwig gave him an extremely offended look and took off for the large open windows at the end of the hall, cuffing him around the head with her outstretched wing as she went.

“Not so loud,” Draco hissed, flapping his hands at Harry exasperatedly. “Do you want everyone to hear?” He looked around, but now that the show with the owl seemed to be over, everyone else was turning their attention back to their food. Neither Crabbe nor Goyle had paused their own breakfast, not even when Hedwig had used Goyle as a temporary perch.

“Look, maybe this is good,” Draco said in a wheedling voice. “If he’s concerned enough to come back, maybe you can convince him to turn himself in, like father wants. That will speed-up the case for his innocence, and with luck he’ll be exonerated sooner, and then you won’t have to worry about him anymore….”

Harry grunted noncommittally, hardly listening. If Sirius came back and got caught, it would be his, Harry’s, fault. Why hadn’t he kept his mouth shut? A few seconds’ pain and he’d had to blab…. If he’d just had the sense to keep it to himself….

“I’m going to write him back,” he announced. “Tell him not to worry, that it was all a mistake.” He took a piece of parchment and a quill from his school bag, pushed the golden plate in front of him out of his way, and wrote the following letter:

> _Dear Sirius,_
> 
> _I reckon I just imagined my scar hurting, I was half asleep when I wrote to you last time. There’s no point coming back, everything’s fine here. Don’t worry about me, my head feels completely normal._
> 
> _Harry_

He then looked around, frowned, and asked, “Where’s Hedwig? Never mind,” he said quickly, before Draco could answer, “I remember her leaving now. Damn. I need to send this back right away, I guess I’d better go to the owlery and fetch her….”

“Wait—not now—you’ll be late for class….”

Harry ignored Draco. He jumped up from the table and fought his way through the tide of students coming in to the Great Hall. The Owlery was situated at the top of West Tower, which was all but deserted at this hour, with everyone at breakfast.

The Owlery was a circular stone room, rather cold and drafty, because none of the windows had glass in them. The floor was entirely covered in straw, owl droppings, and the regurgitated skeletons of mice and voles. There were only a few other owls up here right now, although normally hundreds upon hundreds of owls were nestled here on perches that rose right up to the top of the tower. He spotted Hedwig on a very high perch, her head buried in her wing as though she were already asleep, although she couldn’t have arrived more than a few minutes before Harry. He hurried over to her, sliding a little on the dropping-strewn floor.

It took him a while to persuade her to wake up and then to look at him, as she kept shuffling around on her perch, showing him her tail. She was evidently furious about his lack of gratitude at breakfast. In the end, it was Harry suggesting she might be too tired, and that perhaps he would ask Draco to borrow Bowman, that made her stick out her leg and allow him to tie the letter to it.

“Just find him, all right?” Harry said, stroking her back as he carried her on his arm to one of the holes in the wall. “Before the Ministry’s Aurors do.”

She nipped his finger, perhaps rather harder than she would ordinarily have done, but hooted softly in a reassuring sort of way all the same. Then she spread her wings and took off into the sunrise. Harry watched her fly out of sight with the familiar feeling of unease back in his stomach. He had been so sure that Sirius’s reply would alleviate his worries rather than increasing them.

“Do you honestly think he’ll buy that drivel you wrote?” Draco asked him, when Harry slipped into Charms Class just before the bell.

Harry shrugged. “At least I tried,” he said.

Draco sniffed disapprovingly but since Flitwick walked in then and told them to take out their wands, he said nothing more.


	12. Beauxbatons and Durmstrang

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This section contains a number of brief and heavily-altered excerpts from Chapter Fifteen, reaching from page 228 to page 247 of the American hardcover edition. Please note that the ending scene, with the arrival of the delegations from Beauxbatons and Durmstrang, has been largely excised as being needlessly repetitive; for the full visual experience of their impressive arrivals, please consult the original source.

Harry did his best not to worry about Sirius over the next couple of weeks. True, he could not stop himself from looking anxiously around every morning when the post owls arrived, nor, late at night before he went to sleep, prevent himself from seeing horrible visions of Sirius, cornered by Kingsley Shacklebolt and a complement of Aurors on some dark London street, but between times he tried to keep his mind off his godfather. He wished he still had Quidditch to distract him; nothing worked so well on a troubled mind as a good, hard training session. On the other hand, their lessons were becoming more difficult and demanding than ever before, particularly Moody’s Defense Against the Dark Arts.

To no one’s surprise, except possibly for Goyle, Professor Moody had announced that he would be putting the Imperius Curse on each of them in turn, to demonstrate its power and to see whether they could resist its effects.

“Are you crazy?” Daphne Greengrass demanded. “That’s—that’s illegal! You said yourself, putting it on somebody calls for a lifetime sentence in Azkaban….”

“Dumbledore wants you taught what it feels like,” said Moody, his magical eye swiveling “If you’d rather learn the hard way—when someone’s putting it on you so they can control you completely—fine by me. You’re excused. Off you go.”

He pointed one gnarled finger toward the door. Daphne wavered, looking longingly toward the exit, but when none of her friends stood up to leave with her, she sat back down. Harry and Draco exchanged a dark look. “Right,” Draco muttered, “and what are the odds he won’t sneak up behind you and put it on you when you aren’t expecting, instead?” Harry shook his head and stayed in his seat.

Moody began to beckon students forward in turn and put the Imperius Curse upon them. Harry watched as, one by one, his classmates did the most extraordinary things under its influence. Pansy Parkinson hopped three times around the room, reciting a story about a talking rabbit. Millicent Bulstrode imitated a flamingo. Blaise Zabini performed a series of quite astonishing gymnastics he would certainly not have been capable of in his normal state. Not one of them seemed to be able to fight off the curse, and each of them recovered only when Moody had removed it.

“Potter,” Moody growled, “you next.”

Harry moved forward into the middle of the classroom, into the space that Moody had cleared of desks. Moody raised his wand, pointed it at Harry, and said, _“Imperio!”_

It was the most wonderful feeling. Harry felt a floating sensation as every thought and worry in his head was wiped gently away, leaving nothing but a vague, untraceable happiness. He stood there feeling immensely relaxed, only dimly aware of everyone watching him.

And then he heard Mad-Eye Mood’s voice, echoing in some distant chamber of his empty brain: _Jump onto the desk…jump onto the desk…._

Harry bent his knees obediently, preparing to spring.

_Jump onto the desk…._

Why, though? Another voice had awoken in the back of his brain.

Stupid thing to do, really, said the voice.

_Jump onto the desk…._

No, I don’t think I will, thanks, said the other voice, a little more firmly…no, I don’t really want to….

_Jump! NOW!_

The next thing Harry felt was considerable pain. He had both jumped and tried to prevent himself from jumping—the result was that he’d smashed headlong into the desk, knocking it over, and, by the feeling in his legs, fractured both his kneecaps.

“Now, _that’s_ more like it!” growled Moody’s voice, and suddenly Harry felt the empty, echoing feeling in his head disappear. He remembered exactly what was happening and the pain in his knees seemed to double.

“Look at that, you lot…Potter fought! He fought it, and he damn near beat it! We’ll try that again, Potter, and the rest of you, pay attention—watch his eyes, that’s where you see it—very good, Potter, very good indeed! They’ll have trouble controlling _you!_

 

“The way he talks,” Harry muttered as he hobbled out of the Defense Against the Dark Arts class an hour later (Moody had insisted on putting Harry through his paces four times in a row, until Harry could throw off the curse entirely), “you’d think we were all going to be attacked any second.”

“Probably by him,” Draco muttered. Moody had spent so much time with Harry that he had not been able to get through the whole class yet, and Draco was one of the few students who had not had a go with the Imperius Curse. Given that he had spent the whole class skulking behind either Crabbe or Goyle and trying not to be noticed, Harry thought he had only himself to blame, but now he seemed grumpy to have succeeded. “Did you notice that Theodore and I are the only two he hasn’t tried it on yet?” Draco glanced nervously over his shoulder to check that Moody was definitely out of earshot and went on, “Not that I’m complaining, mind you—or at least I wouldn’t be, if I thought that meant he’d wait for the next lesson to put it on us, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he decides a ‘spontaneous lesson’ is a swell idea. Probably going to jump out from around a corner and make me do something else embarrassing in front of everybody, he’d think that was a big laugh…. And then he’ll act like that was a fair try, and I’m just rubbish at fighting the spell, when I know I’d be at least as good as you if I could see it coming….”

Harry nodded sympathetically. He had thought that Moody seemed to be going out of his way to be nice—well, _nicer_ —to Draco since their first class, and figured that Professor McGonagall’s lecture had finally sunken in, but Draco was not inclined to be forgiving of slights—and being made to bounce around the entrance hall in the form of a ferret was a pretty big slight.

He was still a little jumpier than usual, so Harry politely pretended not to notice that he spilled his pumpkin juice when Hermione Granger came stomping up behind them at dinner that week-end, carrying a sheaf of parchment in one hand and a box whose contents rattled as she walked in the other.

“Interest in joining a good cause?” she said without preamble, taking the lid off the box and thrusting it under Harry’s nose.

Inside were about forty badges, all of different colors, but all bearing the same letters: S.P.E.W. There was a matching badge in bright blue already pinned to the front of Hermione’s robes.

“‘Spew’?” said Harry, picking up a badge and looking at it. “What’s this about?”

“Not _spew_ ,” said Hermione impatiently. “It’s S-P-E-W. Stands for the Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare.”

“The _what?_ ” said Draco, leaving off mopping at his pumpkin juice to look up at Hermione and raise his eyebrows.

“It’s a new organization I’ve started,” Hermione explained enthusiastically. “Only a few people have joined so far, but I thought you all might be interested. Here, we have a manifesto, too.”

She brandished the sheaf of parchment. The writing on it was too tiny for Harry to read anything but the heading: _Stop the Outrageous Abuse of Our Fellow Magical Creatures and Campaign for a Change in Their Legal Status._

“I’ve been researching it thoroughly in the library. Elf enslavement goes back centuries. I can’t believe no one’s done anything about it before now.”

“What are we supposed to ‘do’ about it?” Draco asked. “Everything seems to be working out so far.”

“Well _you_ might say that,” Hermione retorted. “I bet your family’s got a dozen elves, don’t they?

“Nobody’s got a _dozen_ house-elves,” Draco scoffed, “except places like Hogwarts, I suppose. What do ordinary people need with that many?”

“There are house-elves at Hogwarts?” Harry asked.

“‘Course,” grunted Crabbe, “who do you think does the cooking and cleaning?”

Hermione wasn’t listening. “Our short-term aims,” she said, turning her head pointedly away from Draco, “are to secure house-elves fair wages and working conditions. Our long-term aims include changing the law about non-wand use, and trying to get an elf into the Department for the Reg—”

“The law about wand use?” Draco exclaimed loudly. Several people turned to stare. “Are you _mad?_ You want to give _wands_ to _elves?”_ He gaped at Hermione as though she had just proposed chopping off everyone’s left foot. Even Crabbe and Goyle looked upset, like they had just been told that all candy was henceforth confiscated for medical use only.

Hermione looked taken aback by their vehemence, but she refused to back down. “Yes, of course,” she said. “Well it’s not fair, is it? Not letting elves use wands?”

“Not fair?” Draco repeated. _“Not fair?_ Granger, that’s the whole—the underpinnings of our very society—chaos and anarchy—completely off your rocker—” He sputtered, hands fluttering helplessly, hardly able to articulate the level of his distress.

“The elves I’ve met mostly seem, er, pretty happy with their lives,” Harry said slowly.

“Only because they don’t know any better,” Hermione insisted. “And look at Winky, at what happened to _her_. Was that fair? Was that _right?_ It certainly was not,” she answered herself before any of them could. “The way Mr. Diggory talked to her, and the way Mr. Crouch treated her—sending her up to save him a seat even though he knew she was afraid of heights, and then abandoning her when she got in trouble—”

“What else was he supposed to do?” Draco exclaimed. “After she’d embarrassed him like that—!”

Hermione raised her chin. “It’s two Sickles to join,” she told them, speaking even more loudly than Draco, “that buys a badge—and the proceeds will fund our leaflet campaign.”

“Join you?” Draco said, sounding scandalized. “Join you in—in tearing down the foundations of wizarding/elf relations? Are you mental?”

“They wouldn’t need tearing-down if they weren’t so terrible,” Hermione retorted loftily.

“You don’t understand,” Draco argued. “The symbiotic relationship between wizards and elves goes back centuries—”

“Yes,” Hermione interrupted, “I know, I’ve been reading all about it.”

“Well then you should know that the house-elves are happy with their deal!”

“Deal!” Hermione repeated, indignant. “Deal! I refuse to call eternal bondage a ‘deal’!”

“You should,” Draco said sharply, “because that’s what it is. House-elves are prey, or they _were_ , until wizards took them in. In exchange for protection and security, elves agreed to work for wizards, taking over daily and mundane tasks to allow we superior beings to spend time on more important things, while the elves—”

“Superior beings!” Hermione’s voice had gone quite shrill and a lot of people were looking at them now. “Really now, that’s taking things a bit too far!”

“Well maybe you don’t think you’re much better than a house-elf, Granger,” Draco snarled back, “and surely your friends over there aren’t.” He nodded brusquely to the Gryffindor table, where Harry could see Neville Longbottom glancing over at them, his round face white, while Ron Weasley was resolutely hunched over his dinner, his back to them. “The rest of us,” Draco continued scathingly, waving in the general direction of Harry and the other Slytherins, “hold ourselves in somewhat higher esteem—for good reason.”

“If you were such ‘superior beings,’ you wouldn’t need to use slave labor!” Hermione snapped.

Harry tried fruitlessly to shush both her and Draco, who ignored him. Goyle was staring slack-jawed at Hermione, a hunk of candied ham still in his mouth; Crabbe had his head down over his plate and was continuing to shovel food into his mouth as if he couldn’t hear the commotion going on across from him.

Draco waved his fork at Hermione as if it were a wand he was using to hex her. “And if you weren’t so inferior, you wouldn’t be paying any attention to pathetic creatures like house-elves,” he sneered.

“Maybe if you didn’t have your head planted so firmly up your own behind,” Hermione replied, “you wouldn’t have been bounced all over the entrance hall like an anemic beach ball!”

She turned on her heel and stomped back over to the Gryffindor table.

For a long while nobody dared to speak to Draco, who was visibly fuming. His normally white cheeks were darkened by two bright splotches of red and he was carving his dinner into tinier and tinier pieces, none of which he ate. Even Crabbe seemed leery of upsetting him, and was eating with unusual slowness and delicacy, and Tracey Davis, sitting on Draco’s other side, inched so far away from him that she ended up practically sitting in Millicent’s lap.

Eventually Harry ventured a tentative comment about their latest essay for Potions. While thoughts of their homework for Snape did nothing to cheer Harry up, it did at least have the benefit of distracting Draco from his fury at Hermione—and they certainly had more than enough homework to fill several house of conversation.

All the fourth years had noticed a definite increase in the amount of work they were required to do this term. Professor McGonagall explained why, when the class gave a particularly loud groan at the amount of Transfiguration homework she had assigned.

“You are now entering a most important phase of your magical education!” she told them, her eyes glinting dangerously behind her square spectacles. “Your Ordinary Wizarding Levels are drawing closer—”

“I thought O.W.L.s was in fifth year?” Goyle interrupted, looking scared.

“That is correct, Mr. Goyle,” McGonagall said, “but believe me, you need all the preparation you can get! Mr. Malfoy remains the only person in this class who has managed to turn a hedgehog into a satisfactory pincushion, and even his still snores when the lights are turned down.”

Draco, whose pale cheeks had turned rather pink, scowled at McGonagall, but said nothing aloud.

Professor Trelawney was still handing out loads more homework than they were used to from her, but she hadn’t made any predictions that sounded like the one from before exams last year, and Harry was starting to relax in Divination again. He decided that it must have been a fluke—or maybe even Trelawney’s very bad idea of a joke.

Meanwhile Professor Binns, the ghost who taught History of Magic, had them writing weekly essays on the goblin rebellions of the eighteenth century. Professor Snape was forcing them to research antidotes. They took this one seriously, as he had hinted that he might be poisoning one of them before Christmas to see if their antidote worked. “Not that he’d use one of _us_ for that—my money’s on Longbottom,” Draco smirked “—but better safe than sorry.” Harry, who was less confident about his own exemption, especially given Snape’s enduring foul temper, nodded agreeably and read each paragraph twice. He didn’t have enough spare time to manage a third; Professor Flitwick had asked them to read three extra books in preparation for their lesson on Summoning Charms.

Even Hagrid was adding to their workload. The Blast-Ended Skrewts were growing at a remarkable pace given that nobody had yet discovered what they ate. Hagrid was delighted, and as part of their “project,” suggested that they come down to his hut on alternate evenings to observe the skrewts and make notes on their extraordinary behavior.

“I will not,” said Draco flatly when Hagrid had proposed this with the air of Father Christmas pulling an extra-large toy out of his sack. “I see enough of these foul things during lessons, thanks.”

Hagrid’s smile faded off his face.

“Yeh’ll do wha’ yer told,” he growled, “or I’ll be taking a leaf outta Professor Moody’s book…. I hear yeh made a good ferret, Malfoy.”

The Gryffindors roared with laughter. Draco flushed with anger, and Harry gave Hagrid a very hurt look. He was too busy preening to the appreciative crowd of Gryffindor boys to notice. Harry fumed. Why were his friends all so determined to not get along? He didn’t think it was fair, especially not when he put in so much effort to try and get them to give one another a chance. The Slytherins left the lesson very quickly, walking up the hill ahead of the Gryffindors, who lagged behind as usual.

When they arrived in the entrance hall, they found themselves unable to proceed owing to the large crowd of students congregated there, all milling around a large sign that had been erected at the foot of the marble staircase. Crabbe was the tallest of the four, but he was almost as slow a reader as Goyle, and Draco soon got impatient with his stumbling efforts to read the sign aloud to the other three.

“Move aside there,” he said, prodding Goyle to shoulder a trio of sixth year Hufflepuffs out of their way. He craned his neck and read aloud:

**TRIWIZARD TOURNAMENT**

THE DELEGATIONS FROM BEAUXBATONS AND DURMSTRANG  
WILL BE ARRIVING AT 6 O’CLOCK ON FRIDAY THE 30TH OF OCTOBER.  
LESSONS WILL END HALF AN HOUR EARLY—

“Oh what rubbish,” Draco paused to grumble, “we’ve got Potions last thing on Friday. Snape won’t have nearly enough time to poison everybody who needs it now.” He sighed before continuing:

STUDENTS WILL RETURN THEIR BAGS AND BOOKS TO  
THEIR DORMITORIES AND ASSEMBLE IN FRONT OF THE CASTLE  
TO GREET OUR GUESTS BEFORE THE WELCOMING FEAST.

“Only a week away!” said Ernie Macmillan of Hufflepuff, emerging from the crowd, his eyes gleaming. “I wonder if Cedric knows? Think I’ll go and tell him….”

“Cedric?” said Harry, “Cedric Diggory? The Hufflepuff Seeker?”

“Oh great,” Draco sneered, “I hope _he’s_ not thinking of entering. Imagine, a great lump like Diggory, Hogwarts champion! We’d better make sure we find a way to get around the age restriction.”

Harry nodded; he didn’t think Cedric was a bad sort, but he wasn’t a Slytherin either.

“I don’t know,” said Millicent, and giggled, “we could do worse for a champion. At least Diggory is good looking….”

“He’s _okay_ ,” Pansy said dismissively, “but we could do _better_ , too.” She fluttered her eyelashes at Draco, who was too busy directing Crabbe and Goyle to clear them all a path through the chattering crowd toward the staircase to notice.

The appearance of the sign in the entrance hall had a marked effect upon the inhabitants of the castle. During the following week, there seemed to be only one topic of conversation, no matter where Harry went: the Triwizard Tournament. Rumors were flying from student to student like highly contagious germs: who was going to try for Hogwarts champion, what the tournament would involve, how the students from Durmstrang and Beauxbatons differed from themselves.

Harry noticed too that the castle seemed to be undergoing an extra-thorough cleaning. Several grimy portraits had been scrubbed, much to the displeasure of their subjects, who sat huddled in their frames muttering darkly and wincing as they felt their raw pink faces. The suits of armor were suddenly gleaming and moving without squeaking, and Argus Filch, the caretaker, was behaving so ferociously to any students who forgot to wipe their shoes that he terrified a pair of first-year girls into hysterics.

Other members of the staff seemed oddly tense too.

“Goyle, if you let it slip to anyone from Durmstrang that you cannot even manage to disembowel a horned toad without slicing your own fingers open, I will see to it that you spend the rest of this year in detention with me deboning lionfish by hand,” Snape snarled at the end of one particularly difficult lesson, during which Goyle had stabbed himself in the hand no less than seven times, much to Crabbe’s amusement and everyone else’s annoyance.

When they went down to breakfast on the morning of the thirtieth of October, they found that the Great Hall had been decorated overnight. Enormous silk banners hung from the walls, each of them representing a Hogwarts House: green with a silver serpent for Slytherin, blue with a bronze eagle for Ravenclaw, yellow with a black badger for Hufflepuff, and red with a gold lion for Gryffindor. Behind the teachers’ table, the largest banner of all bore the Hogwarts coat of arms: snake, eagle, badger, and lion united about a large letter H.

Harry, Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle sat down beside Theodor Nott at the Slytherin table. He was paging through his Charms textbook but he looked up when they sat down and said, without preamble, “Have you had any training in Occlumency?”

“Excuse me?” said Draco. Harry, Crabbe, and Goyle looked at each other, bewildered; with matching shrugs, Crabbe and Goyle reached for the nearest platters of food and began eating, their interest in Theodore’s question abruptly aborted.

“Occlumency,” Theodore insisted. “I’ve been reading up on it, and it sounds like the principles of Occlumency would work for resisting the Imperius Curse too, but I can’t be sure—the rest of the books I need are all in the Restricted Section, and Professor Snape won’t write me any more notes to check out Restricted materials, not after what happened with the stupid raccoon last year.”

“So ask a different teacher,” Draco said sharply, pouring himself a gobletfull of pumpkin juice and turning away from Theodore.

“I did,” Theodore said, his voice waspish, “but Flitwick said that Occlumency and Legilimency are N.E.W.T.s level lessons and it would ‘inappropriate’ for a fourth year student to start studying them on his own, and McGonagall only ever says that ‘restricted texts are restricted for a reason, Mr. Nott!’ and I’m hardly about to ask Moody, am I?”

“Well I don’t know what you think I’d know about it,” Draco said.

Theodore rolled his eyes. “Come on, everybody knows your parents give you extra lessons over the summer in the sort of stuff Hogwarts doesn’t cover. You might think about spreading the knowledge around. We don’t all have doting mummies and daddies sighing over our every pouty lip or split-end.”

“I don’t have split ends!” Draco squawked indignantly, clutching at his hair.

Harry shook his head and applied himself to his scrambled eggs. Now that Theodore had inadvertently insulted Draco’s good looks, there would be no stopping them sniping at each other. He tuned the increasingly shrill conversation out and looked around the table at the rest of the Slytherins. Pansy, Daphne, and Millicent were giggling together about something; from the way they kept sneaking glances at the Ravenclaw table, Harry figured the source of their amusement must be sitting over there.

Not wanting to get caught-up in whatever was going on with the gossipy girls, he glanced up at the ceiling, which was flooding them all in autumn sunlight. With the Slytherin common room located under the lake, Harry and his friends never knew the day’s weather until they arrived in the Great Hall. He was glad to see that it wasn’t going to be raining when the students from Durmstrang and Beauxbatons arrived and wondered once again how they would be getting here—surely not by train?

Harry turned back to ask if Draco had any ideas, but he and Theodore were still embroiled in their snit, with Draco now in the middle of a long rant about Theodore’s fashion sense.

“—other colors in the world besides gray and brown, you know. Maybe you wouldn’t look so much like a drowned rat if you didn’t dress like one.”

“Some of us like to think about more important things than whether or not we’re as pretty as the dumb birds our father keeps,” Theodore retorted sourly. “Maybe if you weren’t compensating so hard with your clothes, you’d be able to outscore that filthy Mudblood once in a while—”

“Oh right, because you do so much better?” Draco snapped, flushing.

Harry was sure that Draco was about to say something horrible about Hermione—she had to be who they were talking about, she was the only person who regularly outscored them both—and he tensed, wondering if it would be worth coming to her defense or if he would be better off to pretend he couldn’t hear Draco’s insults.

“From what Professor Babbling’s said,” he sneered, “you don’t even compare to—”

Fortunately his next few words were drowned out by the sudden whooshing noise from overhead, which announced the arrival of the post owls. Harry looked up at once, and saw Hedwig soaring toward him. Draco stopped talking abruptly; he watched Hedwig anxiously as she fluttered down onto Harry’s shoulder, folded her wings, and held out her leg wearily.

Harry pulled off Sirius’s reply and offered Hedwig his bacon rinds, which she ate gratefully. Then, checking that no one else at their table was paying them any attention (thankfully Theodore was now buried in his freshly-delivered copy of the _Daily Prophet_ , and seemed to have already forgotten his argument with Draco), Harry read out Sirius’s letter in a whisper to his friends.

> _Nice try, Harry._
> 
> _I’m back in the country and well hidden. I want you to keep me posted on everything that’s going on at Hogwarts. Don’t use Hedwig, keep changing owls, and don’t worry about me, just watch out for yourself. Don’t forget what I said about your scar._
> 
> _Sirius_

“Don’t he like your owl?” Goyle asked.

“Don’t be an imbecile,” Draco retorted before Harry could explain, “he’s worried about drawing attention, especially now that he’s so close to the Ministry again. Snowy owls aren’t native to the area,” he said slowly, waiting for Goyle to get it. “Harry might as well be waving a white flag in the air, pointing straight to Sirius, by sending her back over and over to his hiding place. Somebody will notice, understand?”

“Oh,” not Goyle, not sounding like he did. Draco rolled his eyes.

Harry rolled up the letter and slipped it inside his robes, wondering whether he felt more or less worried than before. He supposed that Sirius managing to get back without being caught was something. He couldn’t deny either that the idea that Sirius was much nearer was reassuring; at least he wouldn’t have to wait so long for a response every time he wrote.

“Thanks, Hedwig,” he said, stroking her. She hooted sleepily, dipped her beak briefly into his goblet of orange juice, then took off again, clearly desperate for a good long sleep in the Owlery.

There was a pleasant feeling of anticipation in the air that day. Nobody was very attentive in lessons, being much more interested in the arrival that evening of the people from Beauxbatons and Durmstrang; the only tense moment came when they walked into Potions Class. Harry expected Snape to be annoyed that his lesson would be half an hour shorter than usual, but his temper seemed no worse than ever, and he even let them pack up a little early so they would be ready to go when the bell rang. “Try and make yourselves look presentable,” he ordered, glaring especially hard at Goyle and Ron, who both had bits of scale stuck to their robes. When the bell rang early, Harry, Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle hurried down to the Slytherin Dungeons, deposited their bags and books as they had been instructed, pulled on their cloaks—Draco insisting that Goyle change into fresh robes before he would let them leave—and rushed back upstairs into the entrance hall.

The Heads of Houses were ordering their students into lines.

“Crabbe, straighten your hat,” Professor Snape snarled. “And Potter, do something with that hair. Parkinson, what is that ridiculous thing around your neck? Remove it at once.”

Pansy pouted and stuffed a large pendant necklace into her pocket. Harry fussed with his fringe more to make it look like he was listening to Snape than because he expected it to do any good.

“That will have to do,” said Professor Snape, “I expect this is as presentable as you lot are going to look, and there’s hardly time for primping either way. Follow me. I want the first year students in the front—and nobody push anyone,” he snapped, glaring warningly at Crabbe.

They filed down the steps and lined up in front of the castle. It was a cold, clear evening; dusk was falling and a pale, transparent-looking moon was already shining over the Forbidden Forest. Harry, standing between Draco and Goyle in the fourth row from the front, saw little Astoria Greengrass bouncing on her toes among her fellow second years. He expected to hear Daphne hiss at her to stop being silly, but she was too caught up in whatever she was saying to Pansy and Lilian to notice her sister.

All the students were whispering together, speculating on how the delegations from the other schools would be arriving. Fortunately the teachers didn’t try and make them be silent; Harry was sure the even threats of detention or lost house points would not have been enough to quell the eager whispers.

They scanned the darkening grounds excitedly, but nothing was moving; everything was still, silent, and quiet as usual. Harry was starting to feel cold. He wished they’d hurry up…. Maybe the foreign students were preparing a dramatic entrance…. If Draco’s parents had almost sent him to Durmstrang, that school at least probably understood the value of good appearances, and Harry expected Beauxbatons was much the same….

And then Dumbledore called out from the back row where he stood with the other teachers—

“Aha! Unless I am very much mistake, the delegation from Beauxbatons approaches!”

The students watched in breathless admiration as first the enormous Beauxbatons carriage—and its equally enormous headmistress—and then the Durmstrang ship arrived on the Hogwarts grounds. Despite both schools’ impressive entrances, most of the student body only wanted to talk about one thing:

Viktor Krum.


	13. The Goblet of Fire

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains several sporadic excerpts of various lengths lifted from Chapter Sixteen, which stretches from pages 248 to 271 in the American hardcover edition.
> 
> NOTE: In _Philosopher’s Stone_ , the order of the student tables is described as Slytherin, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Gryffindor. In _Goblet of Fire_ it is depicted as though Gryffindor and Hufflepuff are next to each other, although since Fleur Delacour comes from the Ravenclaw table to the Gryffindor one to collect their uneaten bouillabaisse, that positioning seems awkward (unless, I suppose, everyone at the Hufflepuff table ate all of theirs too, forcing her to go farther afield in her quest for dinner?). I have chosen to follow the altered GoF table order from this point in the story onward for the sake of consistency with the canon source even though it seems awkward. If I am ever otherwise inconsistent with the table positioning in this story I beg your indulgence, as I am working from conflicting canon sources and I cannot be sure which one I was referring to when I wrote each scene.

As they recrossed the entrance hall with the rest of the Hogwarts students heading for the Great Hall, all anyone was talking about was the world-famous Quidditch star who had arrived with the Durmstrang students.

“Do you think that’s really him?”

“Do you think he would sign my hair ribbon?”

“Does anyone have a quill?”

“Let me borrow your lipstick, I can put a Permanent Sticking Charm on it after he signs it….”

For once, Harry was ahead of the curve; he had known that Viktor Krum was a student at Durmstrang ever since the Quidditch World Cup, thanks to Draco. He hadn’t quite made the connection that the famous Seeker would be coming _here_ , though, and now he craned his neck avidly for another glimpse of that stony, unmistakable profile.

Harry didn’t know why he was surprised; anyone who could make a catch like the one Krum had made at the World Cup was clearly champion material. He wondered that any of the other Durmstrang students had bothered coming; he was sure it would be Krum who was chosen to compete in the tournament.

He and his friends walked over to the Slytherin table, but before they could sit down, Draco made everyone budge-up close together. “Look, the Beauxbaton students have already found seats at the Ravenclaw table,” he explained. “If we make enough room over here, maybe the Durmstrang students will sit with us. No, Crabbe, go sit on the other side with Goyle, leave more space over here….”

 “There are barely a dozen Durmstrang students,” Harry protested, when Draco made him scoot over closer to Pansy and Daphne, both of whom were giggling quite a lot and sneaking glances at Krum over one another’s shoulders. “There’s plenty of room enough for all of them already, leave off….”

But Draco wasn’t listening. Their other housemates had caught the idea by then, and all over the Slytherin table people were squeezing in tight next to one another. A few of them joined Draco in waving to catch the eye of the Durmstrang students, who eventually trooped over, led by Krum himself. Draco ushered Krum into a seat and started saying, “We saw you in the World Cup, you know—Harry and I here, my friend Harry Potter, you know who he is of course—we were up in the top box, we saw you come in after you’d caught the Snitch, bloody amazing catch that was! I’m sure you don’t remember us, of course, but we were there with my parents, they’re close friends of Cornelius Fudge, he’s the British Minister of Magic. It’s a real tragedy Bulgaria lost, I mean you were the best flier out there….”

Harry caught Krum’s eye and smiled awkwardly. Krum stared ahead stoically, not speaking, but his fellow Durmstrang students seemed happy enough with the welcome they were getting from the Slytherins. They were pulling off their heavy furs and looking up at the starry ceiling with expressions of interest. A couple of them were picking up the golden plates and goblets and examining them, apparently impressed.

Up at the staff table, Filch, the caretaker, was adding chairs. He was wearing his moldy old tailcoat in honor of the occasion. Harry was surprised to see that he added four chairs, two on either side of Dumbledore’s.

“But there are only two extra people,” Harry said. “Why’s Filch putting out four chairs, who else is coming?”

Draco wasn’t listening; he was too preoccupied with fawning over Krum. Pansy and Daphne kept leaning forward to look at him around Harry. Eventually he scooted back as far on the bench as he could go without risking falling off the other side in order to give them a better view. He kept looking back and forth himself between Krum and the staff table, not wanting to stare; when he caught himself ogling the famous Seeker, he forced himself to look around at the Great Hall’s decorations and the Beauxbatons students instead. They were looking around the Great Hall with glum expressions on their faces. Three of them were still clutching scarves and shawls around their heads.

When all of the students had entered the Hall and settled down at their House tables, the staff entered, filing up to the top table and taking their seats. Last in line were Professor Dumbledore, Professor Karkaroff, and Madame Maxime. When their headmistress appeared, the pupils from Beauxbatons leapt to their feet. A few of the Hogwarts students laughed. The Beauxbatons party appeared            quite unembarrassed, however, and did not resume their seats until Madame Maxime had sat down on Dumbledore’s left-hand side. Dumbledore remained standing, and a silence fell over the Great Hall.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, ghosts and—most especially—guests,” said Dumbledore, beaming around at the foreign students. “I have great pleasure in welcoming you all to Hogwarts. I hope and trust that your stay here will be both comfortable and enjoyable.

One of the Beauxbatons girls still clutching a muffler around her head gave what was unmistakably a derisive laugh.

“Well she isn’t champion material,” Pansy sneered quietly, “not if she can’t even handle a bit of weather! I bet she’ll be the first person rejected by the judge!”

“The tournament will be officially opened at the end of the feast,” said Dumbledore. “I now invite you all to eat, drink, and make yourselves at home!”

He sat down, and Harry saw Karkaroff lean forward at once and engage him in conversation.

The plates in front of them filled with food as usual. The house-elves in the kitchen seemed to have pulled out all the stops; there was a greater variety of dishes in front of them than Harry had ever seen, including several that were definitely foreign.

Harry tried a cold, greenish-white [soup](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarator) that had bits of chopped-up cucumbers in it, and found it surprisingly tasty. He found the pickled vegetables less appetizing, and was happy to push that dish toward the Durmstrang students. Several of his fellow Slytherins looked uncertain about trying the unfamiliar foods, but Crabbe and Goyle dug-in with their usual lack of restraint, earning themselves cheerful commendations from some of the foreign students, particularly when Goyle swallowed a stuffed yellow pepper whole.

The Great Hall seemed somehow much more crowded than usual, even though there were barely twenty additional students there; perhaps it was because their differently colored uniforms stood out so clearly against the black of the Hogwarts robes. Now that they had removed their furs, the Durmstrang students were revealed to be wearing robes of a deep bloodred.

Hagrid sidled into the Hall through a door behind the staff table twenty minutes after the start of the feast. He slid into his seat at the end and waved at Harry with a very heavily bandaged hand.

“Skrewts doing all right, Hagrid?” Harry called.

“Thrivin’,” Hagrid called back happily.

“Vot are—excuse—skrewts?” one of the Durmstrang girls asked, leaning forward to peer around Krum, who kept his eyes on his food and ate mechanically while Draco (and most of the other nearby students, especially Pansy and Montague) gushed at him.

“Oh—er—just some creatures that Hagrid has been having us study,” Harry said, feeling suddenly awkward. “He’s the Care of Magical Creatures teacher, the one on the end there.”

“Ah, the vone huge as the Beauxbatons headmistress, yes? Interesting.” The girl studied Hagrid for several minutes, then shrugged and plopped another spoonful of black pudding onto her golden plate.

At that moment, Harry’s attention was caught by one of the Beauxbatons students walking from her seat at the Ravenclaw table over to the Gryffindors. She bent over in brief conversation with Hermione and Ron, then carried a golden tureen of stew back to her seat. A sheet of silvery-blonde hair fell almost to her waist and something about the way she moved caught Harry’s eye, even from the other side of the room. She looked almost like the veela from the Quidditch World Cup, although of course that was impossible—wasn’t it? Regardless, he wasn’t the only one to notice her; as the girl crossed the Hall, many boys’ heads turned, and some of them seemed to have become temporarily speechless.

“Wow,” Daphne whistled. “How does—” She cleared her throat. “How do you think she gets her hair to look like that?”

“No idea,” replied Pansy, sounding awed and trying to hide it.

“Ah!” said Blaise Zabini, leaning forward with an expression of sudden interest on his handsome face, “Now that’s more like it! Why aren’t there any girls like that at Hogwarts, hmm? We need to raise our quality control.” He laughed harshly, ignoring the glares that Pansy and Daphne directed his way.

“The quality at Hogwarts seems okay to me,” said Harry without thinking. Cho happened to be sitting only a few places away from the girl with the silvery hair.

“Indeed it is,” Daphne said primly, and Pansy shot Harry a pleased grin that he was too preoccupied to notice.

“When you’re all done drooling,” Theodore Nott drawled, “take a look at our latecomers.”

He was pointing up at the staff table. The two remaining empty seats had just been filled. Ludo Bagman was now sitting on Professor Karkaroff’s other side, while Mr. Crouch, he of the hapless Winky, was next to Madame Maxime.

“What are _they_ doing here?” said Harry in surprise.

“Well they masterminded this whole affair, didn’t they?” said Draco, sounding smug. He turned to explain the identities of the two new arrivals to Krum, who couldn’t have looked less interested.

When the second course arrived they noticed a number of unfamiliar desserts too. There were several rich pastries, and a number of things that seemed to involve yogurt or jam, and at least three different flavors of crème brûlée. Harry happily tried some of everything he could reach although not, of course, as many dishes as did Crabbe and Goyle.

Once the golden plates had been wiped clean, Dumbledore stood up again. A pleasant sort of tension seemed to fill the Hall now. Harry felt a slight thrill of excitement, wondering what was coming. Two seats down from him, Viktor Krum looked interested for the first time since he had entered the Great Hall.

“The moment has come,” said Dumbledore, smiling around at the sea of upturned faces. “The Triwizard Tournament is about to start. I would like to say a few words of explanation before we bring in the casket—”

“The what?” Harry muttered.

Draco hissed at him to be quiet.

“—just to clarify the procedure that we will be following this year. But first, let me introduce, for those who do not know them, Mr. Bartemius Crouch, Head of the Department of International Magical Cooperation” —there was a smattering of polite applause— “and Mr. Ludo Bagman, Head of the Department of Magical Games and Sports.”

There was a much louder round of applause for Bagman than for Crouch, perhaps because of his fame as a Beater, or simply because he looked so much more likeable. He acknowledged it with a jovial wave of his hand. Bartemius Crouch did not smile or wave when his name was announced. Remembering him in his neat suit at the Quidditch World Cup, Harry thought he looked strange in wizard’s robes. His toothbrush mustache and severe parting looked very odd next to Dumbledore’s long white hair and beard.

“Mr. Bagman and Mr. Crouch have worked tirelessly over the last few months on the arrangements for the Triwizard Tournament,” Dumbledore continued, “and they will be joining myself, Professor Karkaroff, and Madame Maxime on the panel that will judge the champions’ efforts.”

At the mention of the word “champions,” the attentiveness of the listening students seemed to sharpen. Perhaps Dumbledore had noticed their sudden stillness, for he smiled as he said, “The casket, then, if you please, Mr. Filch.”

Filch, who had been lurking unnoticed in a far corner of the Hall, now approached Dumbledore carrying a great wooden chest encrusted with jewels. It looked extremely old. A murmur of excited interest rose from the watching students; Goyle leaned so far out that he fell from his seat, but everyone was too fixated on the casket to laugh at him.

“The instructions for the tasks the champions will face this year have already been examined by Mr. Crouch and Mr. Bagman,” said Dumbledore as Filch placed the chest carefully on the table before him, “and they have made the necessary arrangements for each challenge. There will be three tasks, spaced throughout the school year, and they will test the champions in many different ways…their magical prowess—their daring—their powers of deduction—and, of course, their ability to cope with danger.”

At this last word, the Hall was filled with a silence so absolute that nobody seemed to be breathing.

“As you know, three champions compete in the tournament,” Dumbledore went on calmly, “one from each of the participating schools. They will be marked on how well they perform each of the tournament tasks and the champion with the highest total after task three will win the Triwizard Cup. The champions will be chosen by an impartial selector: the Goblet of Fire.”

Dumbledore now took out his wand and tapped three times upon the top of the casket. The lid creaked slowly open. Dumbledore reached inside it and pulled out a large, roughly hewn wooden cup. It would have been entirely unremarkable—indeed, Draco whispered, “That’s it? That’s the judge?” in a scandalized voice—had it not been full to the brim with dancing blue-white flames.

Dumbledore closed the casket and placed the goblet carefully on top of it, where it would be clearly visible to everyone in the Hall.

“Anybody wishing to submit themselves as a champion must write their name and school clearly upon a slip of parchment and drop it into the goblet,” said Dumbledore. “Aspiring champions have twenty-four hours in which to put their names forward. Tomorrow night, Halloween, the goblet will return the names of the three it has judged most worthy to represent their schools. The goblet will be placed in the entrance hall tonight, where it will be freely accessible to all those wishing to compete.

“To ensure that no underage student yields to temptation,” said Dumbledore, “I will be drawing an Age Line around the Goblet of Fire once it has been placed in the entrance hall. Nobody under the age of seventeen will be able to cross this line.

“Finally, I wish to impress upon any of you wishing to compete that this tournament is not to be entered into lightly. Once a champion has been selected by the Goblet of Fire, he or she is obliged to see the tournament through to the end. The placing of your name in the goblet constitutes a binding, magical contract. There can be no change of heart once you have become a champion. Please be very sure, therefore, that you are wholeheartedly prepared to play before you drop your name into the goblet. Now, I think it is time for bed. Good night to you all.”

A murmur of interested talk rose from the Slytherin table. Draco finally addressed someone other than  Krum, leaning over to Harry and musing, “An Age Line. Well, I’m sure that can be tricked…. And the goblet doesn’t seem like it will care how old a contestant is, or else Dumbledore wouldn’t have to bother with protections, right?”

Harry nodded. “Probably not,” he agreed.

“Well—then we’ll figure it out! Father already said mother wouldn’t let him mail an Aging Potion, that would have been the easiest thing, but maybe Professor Snape will let us use the Potions lab; we can make our own, if we rush a little. You will enter too, right Harry?” Draco asked belatedly.

Harry thought briefly of Dumbledore’s insistence that nobody under seventeen should submit their name, but then the wonderful picture of himself winning the Triwizard Tournament filled his mind again…. He wondered how angry Dumbledore would be if someone younger than seventeen _did_ find a way to get over the Age Line….

The Durmstrang students started to stand, jolting Harry from his thoughts.

“Where are you lot supposed to sleep?” Draco asked Krum, immediately forgetting Harry again. “The headmaster didn’t say; and are you going to have classes with us, or what?”

“Ve sleep on the ship,” Krum said, shrugging and picking up his heavy furred cloak. “Ve vill have classes with your sixth and seventh years.” He shrugged again. “It will be different, I suppose, but ehh…for the chance to be a champion, it is not such a large thing.”

Draco looked like he would have liked to continue questioning Krum, but he was already turning to leave the Great Hall with the rest of the students from Durmstrang, and Karkaroff was shoving his way through the crowd to get to Krum’s side. Draco, Harry, and their friends stepped back out of the way and watched the Durmstrang students depart—but then Karkaroff glanced sideways and noticed Harry.

He stared at him as though he couldn’t believe his eyes. Next to Karkaroff, the students from Durmstrang milled about uncertainly, wondering why their headmaster had frozen. He still held one of Krum’s sleeves from his attempt to help the burly Seeker adjust his robes. Karkaroff’s eyes moved slowly up Harry’s face and fixed upon his scar. The Durmstrang students who had shared a table with Harry only a few moments ago were now staring curiously at him, as though bothering to look at him properly for the first time. Out of the corner of his eye, Harry saw comprehension dawn on a few of their faces. The girl who had asked him about Hagrid gasped aloud and pointed at his forehead, leaning over to whisper to the boy next to her.

“Yeah, that’s Harry Potter,” said a growling voice from behind them all.

Professor Karkaroff spun around. Mad-Eye Moody was standing there, leaning heavily upon his staff, his magical eye glaring unblinkingly at the Durmstrang headmaster.

Draco swelled-up with vicarious pride, turning to make sure that the Durmstrang students could get a good look at the both of them. He quickly took a step closer to Harry’s side, so there would be no doubt they were friends.

The color drained from Karkaroff’s face as Harry watched. A terrible look of mingled fury and fear came over him.

“You!” he said, staring at Moody as though unsure he was really seeing him.

“Me,” said Moody grimly. “And unless you’ve got anything to say to Potter, Karkaroff, you might want to move. You’re blocking the exit.”

It was true; in addition to his own Durmstrang students, almost half of the Slytherins were stuck behind Karkaroff’s roadblock, and a number of the Hufflepuffs as well, all of them craning their necks and standing on the benches to see what was causing the holdup.

Without another word, Professor Karkaroff swept his students away with him. Moody watched him until he was out of sight, his magical eye fixed upon his back, a look of intense dislike upon his mutilated face.

 

As the next day was Saturday, most students would normally have breakfasted late. Harry, Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle were not alone in rising much earlier than they usually did on weekends. When they went up into the entrance hall, they saw about twenty people milling around it, some of them eating toast, all examining the Goblet of Fire. It had been placed in the center of the hall on the stool that normally bore the Sorting Hat. A thin golden line had been traced on the floor, forming a circle ten feet around it in every direction.

Draco spotted some second year Slytherins and made a beeline for them. “Who all has put their names in so far?” he demanded.

Astoria Greengrass looked up from whatever she and her friends had been giggling over; it looked suspiciously to Harry like a name scrawled in messy letters across a scrap of parchment. “Everybody from Durmstrang,” she said. “No one from Hogwarts has that we saw, but,” she added smugly, “three Gryffindors _tried_.”

“What do you mean, tried?” Harry asked.

Astoria’s friends burst into giggles. “I mean,” she said, “they took an Aging Potion, but it didn’t fool the Age Line, so the first one who jumped over the line got thrown out again— _wham!_ —and then he grew a big white beard. His brother jumped in too, and the same thing happened to him. It was those Weasley twins and that friend of theirs who always commentates during Quidditch matches, although he didn’t cross the line and grow a beard—just the Wealseys. They looked _ridiculous_.”

Draco cackled and Harry laughed weakly, relieved not to be sporting a beard of his own.

He was careful to give the Age Line a wide berth on the way in to breakfast.

The decorations in the Great Hall had changed this morning. As it was Halloween, a cloud of live bats was fluttering around the enchanted ceiling, while hundreds of carved pumpkins leered from every corner. Draco led the way over to Pansy, Daphne, and Millicent, who were discussing Hogwarts students of seventeen or over who might be entering.

“Warrington’s already put his name in,” Pansy told them before they could even sit down. “He did it first thing, even before the Durmstrang students.”

“Warrington wouldn’t be so bad,” Draco mused. Harry shrugged; while Cassius Warrington was on the Slytherin Quidditch team like them, and thus Harry was honor-bound to support him, he didn’t think that Warrington really had the makings of a champion—but then, it wasn’t his job to determine who did.

“Some of the Hufflepuffs are saying that Cedric Diggory has put his name in, too,” Daphne added.

Draco made a face. “Oh, anyone but him,” he grumbled. Cedric was the captain of the Hufflepuff Quidditch team as well as their Seeker, and consequently both Harry and Draco considered him an opponent whether the Quidditch season was happening or not.

“Ooh, listen to that!” Millicent said suddenly, sitting up straighter.

People were cheering out in the entrance hall. They all swiveled around in their seats and saw Angelina Johnson, a tall black girl who played Chaser on the Gryffindor Quidditch team, coming into the Hall, grinning in an embarrassed sort of way.

“Oh no,” Draco moaned, deducing the only possible reason for the cheers, “we can’t have a Gryffindor champion! Hurry, Parkinson, who else from Slytherin is going to try?”

“Well I don’t know, do I?” Pansy sniffed. “It’s not like anyone bothers to tell me their plans….”

“No,” Draco cajoled, “but you usually know them anyway, come on, share.”

“Yeah, tell us what you’ve heard, please,” Harry added.

Pansy dithered for another few moments, but in the end the urge to show-off what she knew was too strong. “Well, there’s Adelaide Essex, from sixth year—she just had her birthday last week, and rumor has it that she’ll be putting her name in. Then there’s Runcorn—the elder, of course, not the one in our year—and Alden, and Pucey _says_ he’s going to but _I_ think he’s just blowing hot-air.”

“Heh,” said Crabbe through a mouthful of [banitsa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banitsa), “someone should point him toward the Bow-baton students, they look like they could use some warmin’ up.” He chortled; the others rolled their eyes and ignored him.

“So how do you reckon we’re going to get across the Age Line, then?” Draco asked Harry.

“I don’t know,” said Harry, who hadn’t really been thinking about it, happy daydreams aside. “An Aging Potion won’t work….”

Draco shrugged. “Well, just because it didn’t work for a bunch of Gryffindors—they probably didn’t do it right—but,” he allowed, “it’s probably not worth trying since they’ve already botched it. Polyjuice might do it, but that takes forever to brew. Maybe Professor Snape has some on hand he’ll let us use….”

Harry, remembering Snape’s reaction when Harry had flown on his stolen Firebolt last year when it was under suspicion of being Cursed, shook his head. “I doubt it,” he said grimly.

Draco huffed. “Well we have to think of _something_. You do want to enter, don’t you?”

“Oh yeah,” said Harry quickly, “sure, of course I do….”

“Well then help me think,” Draco ordered.

Harry muttered something noncommittal and bent low over his breakfast. While the variety of food wasn’t as impressive as it had been last night, there were a number of foreign dishes and pastries, and he pretended to be distracted by trying them all.

Draco turned to talk possible solutions with Pansy and Daphne instead.

“I wish mother hadn’t put her foot down,” Draco complained as they left the Great Hall after finishing breakfast. “I’m _sure_ father would have sent me—well, us—something that would have worked, if she hadn’t forbidden it. She’s so overprotective,” he whined, “it’s so annoying!”

“Yeah,” agreed Harry bitterly, “it must be terrible.”

“You have no idea,” Draco assured him, which Harry already knew.

He scowled at his friend, but was distracted by a wave of motion at the other end of the entrance hall.

The students from Beauxbatons were coming through the front doors from the grounds, among them, the silver-haired girl. Those gathered around the Goblet of Fire stood back to let them pass, watching eagerly.

Madame Maxime entered the hall behind her students and organized them into a line. One by one, the Beauxbatons students stepped across the Age Line and dropped their slips of parchment into the blue-white flames. As each name entered the fire, it turned briefly red and emitted sparks.

“What about the ones who don’t get to be champion?” Goyle asked, watching as one boy leaned a little too close to the flames for comfort and jumped back with a yelp. The other Beauxbatons students laughed and mussed his hair, teasing him in French while he blushed furiously. “‘Cause there’s only gonna be one, right, and there’s more than one of ‘em here. Do the rest gotta go home?”

“Dunno,” said Harry. “They’ll hang around, I suppose…. Madame Maxime’s staying to judge, isn’t she?”

When all the Beauxbatons students had submitted their names, Madame Maxime led them back out of the hall and out onto the grounds again.

“Where are they going?” Goyle asked, sounding worried. “Aren’t they gonna eat breakfast?”

“Maybe they’re eating out…wherever they’re staying. Probably in their carriage, if the Durmstrang students are staying on their ship,” Harry surmised. “That would make sense, right?”

“Sure,” agreed Draco, “let’s go see!”

They followed the Beauxbatons students down the front steps and across the lawn. The gigantic powder-blue carriage in which they had arrived had been parked two hundred yards from the front door of Hagrid’s hut, and the students were climbing back inside it. The elephantine flying horses that had pulled the carriage were now grazing in a makeshift paddock alongside it.

“Let’s go see Hagrid while we’re here,” Harry suggested, and set-off before his friends could argue. He set a brisk pace, pretending he couldn’t hear Draco’s unhappy muttering as the other three trailed him across the lawn.

Harry knocked on Hagrid’s door, and Fang’s booming barks answered instantly.

“’Bout time!” said Hagrid, when he’d flung open the door. “Thought you lot’d forgotten where I live!”

“Well the teachers are all giving us loads of work this year, you know,” Harry started to say teasingly, but his voice got stuck in his throat halfway through the sentence. He stared at Hagrid as if he had never seen him before.

Hagrid was wearing a horrible hairy brown suit, plus a checked yellow-and-orange tie. This wasn’t the worst of it, though; he had evidently tried to tame his hair, using large quantities of what appeared to be axle grease. It was now slicked down into two bunches—perhaps he had tried a ponytail like Flitwick often sported, but found he had too much hair. The look didn’t really suit Hagrid at all. For a moment, all four of them gaped at him, speechless. Then Draco burst into peals of laughter. Crabbe and Goyle joined in, chuckling, a moment later.

Hagrid stared at them, looking nonplussed.

Harry cast about desperately for something to say. “So, how are the skrewts?” he asked.

“They’re getting’ massive,” Hagrid said, happily distracted. He had to raise his voice to be heard over Draco’s howling, but he didn’t seem to mind. “Mus’ be nearly three foot long now. I’ve got ‘em out by the pumpkin patch. On’y trouble is, they’ve started killin’ each other.”

“That’s too bad,” Harry lied, glaring at his friends.

“Yeah,” said Hagrid sadly. “S’okay, though, I’ve got ‘em in separate boxes now. Still got abou’ twenty.”

“Oh…good,” said Harry, following Hagrid inside. Draco staggered after them, still laughing, hanging off of Goyle’s shoulder to stay upright. Harry did his best to ignore all three of his friends.

Hagrid’s cabin comprised a single room, in one corner of which was a gigantic bed covered in a patchwork quilt. A similarly enormous wooden table and chairs stood in front of the fire beneath the quantity of cured hams and dead birds hanging from the ceiling. They sat down at the table—Draco still chuckling weakly, now wiping tears from his eyes—while Hagrid started to make tea, and were soon immersed in yet more discussion of the Triwizard Tournament. Hagrid seemed quite as excited about it as they were.

“You wait,” he said, grinning. “You jus’ wait. Yer going ter see some stuff yeh’ve never seen before. Firs’ task…ah, but I’m not supposed ter say.”

“Go on, Hagrid!” Harry and the others urged him, Draco for the first time looking at Hagrid as though he might have some value in life, but he just shook his head, grinning.

“I don’ want ter spoil it fer yeh,” said Hagrid. “But it’s gonna be spectacular, I’ll tell yeh that. Them champions’re going ter have their work cut out. Never thought I’d live ter see the Triwizard Tournament played again!”

Harry would have been happy to spend the afternoon trading stories with Hagrid and trying to coax him into saying what he knew about the First Task, but Draco was adamant about wanting to find a way over the Age Line, and once it became clear that Hagrid wasn’t going to be easily persuaded into sharing his secrets, he was impatient to be gone.

Harry reluctantly bid the large gamekeeper goodbye—trying not to look too closely at his horrible new hairstyle, or the equally horrible suit—and the four of them trooped back up to the castle by means of a meandering detour near the Great Lake. The Durmstrang ship was still anchored in the middle, but there was no sign of any students from the outside. Harry remembered Karkaroff’s strange reaction to him the night before and shivered. He led the way back up to the castle, pausing now and then to look over his shoulder as though afraid someone might be watching him.

Once inside they sought out Professor Snape, but either eagerness made Draco less subtle than usual or Snape was already expecting the question, because he cut them off before Draco was halfway through his pitch, and told them in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t about to help anyone get across Dumbledore’s Age Line—least of all someone whom Narcissa Malfoy had made him explicitly promise not to assist in entering the tournament.

Draco sulked all the way through lunch, ignoring the opportunity to fawn over Viktor Krum again (the Durmstrang students had come in to eat, and were sitting with the Slytherins once more), but he seemed to get a second wind after the meal and he led the four of them up to the library, where they spent most of the afternoon researching various methods of magical aging. It soon became clear that Crabbe and Goyle were doing more arm-wrestling than researching, but neither Harry nor Draco stopped them; that was an activity that could amuse the two of them for hours, and it was reasonably quiet, so Madam Pince wouldn’t come over and yell at them all for disrupting her library’s silence.

They weren’t the only underage students perusing the books, but if anyone else found a solution, they kept it to themselves.

Finally, an hour before dinner, Draco called an end to the search. “I give up,” he said, scowling darkly. “There’s nothing in these that will work, not in the time we have anyway. Why didn’t Dumbledore set the goblet up weeks ago? We could have figured out a way over his Age Line, and there would still have been plenty of time for the students from Durmstrang and Beauxbatons to add their names once they arrived.”

“Well,” said Harry, “probably that’s why he didn’t, then.”

Draco glared at him and Crabbe laughed.

“Come on,” Draco grumbled, “let’s go see who else has entered.”

They trooped back down to the dungeons, where Draco spent the next forty minutes trying to talk one of the older Slytherins into putting his and Harry’s names in for them. Finally, ten minutes before they were due to reassemble for the feast, Miles Bletchley, the Slytherin team’s Keeper, agreed to enter their names.

Harry’s stomach tightened in knots as Bletchley approached the Age Line, one slip of parchment clenched in each fist. Harry wasn’t sure whether to hope that Bletchley would succeed, or fail. He had readily agreed that Draco’s name should be the first tried—“Alphabetical order,” Draco had suggested smugly, “it’s the only way to be fair!”—because he wasn’t sure that he really wanted to enter, but he didn’t see any way to back-out now without looking like a coward in front of his friends. He consoled himself with the thought that out of all the people from Hogwarts who had submitted their names, there was almost no chance that the Goblet of Fire would select an unqualified fourteen-year-old for a champion—he hoped. Then again if it did, he wasn’t exactly unfamiliar with doing dangerous things and succeeding at impossible tasks, like rescuing girls from He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named and helping convicted murderers escape the Ministry of Magic….

By the time Bletchley raised one hand above the blue-white flames, Harry had half-convinced himself that he wanted him to succeed, so it was with a groan of disappointment that he watched the flames turn red and the thin slip of parchment curl up into a tight knot above the goblet. Then it too turned red and started giving off sparks before chasing Bletchley out of the hall with a series of small firework-like explosions. The second slip, with Harry’s name on it, fell to the ground and was quickly trampled by the crowd.

The watching students all laughed, even Draco, although Harry breathed a quiet sigh of relief and then felt immediately guilty for it. He didn’t have time to sort out his feelings, though; it was nearly five o’clock, and time to take their seats in anticipation of the announcement of the school champions.

When they entered the candlelit Great Hall it was almost full. Harry, Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle hurried to claim seats at the Slytherin table. Oddly, Draco wasn’t complaining that his scheme to enter the tournament had failed; Harry wondered if he secretly felt a little relieved, too.

They had barely taken their seats when Filch walked by carrying the goblet. He held the stool with the casket balanced on it out in front of him at arm’s length and walked with exaggerated care, his eyes fixed on the flames. To Harry, it looked like a disaster waiting to happen, but no one came to help the grumpy old caretaker.

“Be a shame if someone tripped him,” Draco snickered, and Harry grinned.

Filch deposited casket and goblet in front of Dumbledore’s empty chair at the teachers’ table without mishap, possibly because Crabbe and Goyle weren’t good at picking up subtle hints and Draco hadn’t been quick enough to issue them an order—but probably not even Draco would have _really_ interfered with the selection of champions just for a quick laugh at Filch’s expense.

“How did it go?” Pansy asked breathlessly, sliding into the seat next to Draco. He shook his head without speaking and her face fell. “Aw,” she said. “Well…I guess I hope it’ll be Essex, then, or maybe Pucey….”

“Pucey’s too much of a goody two-shoes,” Draco retorted, “he’d never win. No, Montague’s probably our best bet. He’s a bit thick, but he takes orders well, and he doesn’t have enough brains to be scared. As long as someone clever is around to point him in the right direction, he might be able to win.”

Harry thought that Draco was being a bit unkind to Graham Montague—he wasn’t as quick-witted as Draco himself, or even as Harry, but he also wasn’t on Crabbe or Goyle’s level—but since he figured that Draco was just angling to be the “someone clever,” he didn’t bother to speak-up in their teammate’s defense.

The Halloween feast seemed to take much longer than usual. Perhaps because it was their second feast in two days, Harry didn’t seem to fancy the extravagantly prepared food as much as he would have normally. Like everyone else in the Hall, judging by the constantly craning necks, the impatient expressions on every face, the fidgeting, and the standing up to see whether Dumbledore had finished eating yet, Harry simply wanted the plates to clear, and to hear who had been selected as champions.

At long last, the golden plates returned to their original spotless state; there was a sharp upswing in the level of noise within the Hall, which died away almost instantly as Dumbledore got to his feet. On either side of him, Professor Karkaroff and Madame Maxime looked as tense and expectant as anyone. Ludo Bagman was beaming and winking at various students. Mr. Crouch, however, looked quite uninterested, almost bored.

“Well, the goblet is almost ready to make its decision,” said Dumbledore. “I estimate that it requires one more minute. Now, when the champions’ names are called, I would ask them please to come up to the top of the Hall, walk along the staff table, and go through into the next chamber” —he indicated the door behind the staff table— “where they will be receiving their first instructions.”

He took out his wand and gave a great sweeping wave with it; at once, all the candles except those inside the carved pumpkins were extinguished, plunging them into a state of semidarkness. The Goblet of Fire now shone more brightly than anything in the whole Hall, the sparkling bright, bluey-whiteness of the flames almost painful on the eyes. Everyone watched, waiting…. A few people kept checking their watches….

“Come on, come on,” Draco whispered impatiently.

The flames inside the goblet turned suddenly red again. Sparks began to fly from it. Next moment, a tongue of flame shot into the air, a charred piece of parchment fluttered out of it—the whole room gasped.

Dumbledore caught the piece of parchment and held it out at arm’s length, so that he could read it by the light of the flames, which had turned back to blue-white.

“The champion for Durmstrang,” he read, in a strong, clear voice, “will be Viktor Krum.”

The entire Slytherin table erupted in cheers, as did the rest of the Hall; even his fellow Durmstrang students applauded, although several of them looked more disappointed than elated. Harry couldn’t blame them for that, nor for the few fleeting expressions of relief he saw cross a face or two here and there. Several people, including Draco, tried to lean across the table to shake Krum’s hand or clap him congratulatorily on the back. The crowd was so thick that they mainly ended up congratulating each other instead, but none of them seemed to mind.

Krum stood and slouched up toward Dumbledore; he turned right, walked along the staff table, and disappeared through the door into the next chamber.

“Bravo, Viktor!” boomed Karkaroff, so loudly that everyone could hear him, even over all the applause. “Knew you had it in you!”

The clapping and chattering died down. Now everyone’s attention was focused again on the goblet, which, seconds later, turned red once more. A second piece of parchment shot out of it, propelled by the flames.

“The champion for Beauxbatons,” said Dumbledore, “is Fleur Delacour!”

“Look who it is,” Daphne squealed, “look who it is!”

“Humph!” said Pansy, scowling. “She’s the one who couldn’t handle the cold, isn’t she? I bet she doesn’t last long.” Everyone else at the Slytherin table was applauding, though, as the girl who so resembled a veela got gracefully to her feet, shook back her sheet of silvery blonde hair, and swept up between the Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff tables.

“Some folks over there look disappointed,” Theodore pointed out nastily, jerking his chin toward the remainder of the Beauxbatons party. “Disappointed” was a bit of an understatement, Harry thought. Two of the girls who had not been selected had dissolved into tears and were sobbing with their heads on their arms.

When Fleur Delacour too had vanished into the side chamber, silence fell again, but this time it was a silence so stiff with excitement you could almost taste it. The Hogwarts champion next…

And the Goblet of Fire turned red once more; sparks showered out of it; the tongue of flame shot high into the air, and from its tip Dumbledore pulled the third piece of parchment.

“The Hogwarts champion,” he called, “is Cedric Diggory.”

“No!” Draco wailed, and several of the Slytherins moaned or hissed in disappointment, but Harry could barely hear them because the uproar from the third table over was too great. Every single Hufflepuff had jumped to his or her feet, screaming and stamping, as Cedric made his way past them, grinning broadly, and headed off toward the chamber behind the teachers’ table. Indeed, the applause for Cedric went on so long that it was some time before Dumbledore could make himself heard again.

“Excellent!” Dumbledore called happily as the tumult died down. “Well, we now have our three champions. I am sure I can count upon all of you, including the remaining students from Beauxbatons and Durmstrang, to give your champions every ounce of support you can muster. By cheering your champion on, you will contribute in a very real—”

But Dumbledore suddenly stopped speaking, and it was apparent to everybody what had distracted him.

The fire in the goblet had just turned red again. Sparks were flying out of it. A long flame shot suddenly into the air, and borne upon it was another piece of parchment.

Automatically, it seemed, Dumbledore reached out a long hand and seized the parchment. He held it out and stared at the name written on it. There was a long pause, during which Dumbledore stared at the slip in his hands, and everyone in the room stared at Dumbledore. And then Dumbledore cleared his throat and read out—

_“Harry Potter.”_


	14. The Four Champions

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains several sporadic excerpts, some of them quite lengthy, from Chapter Seventeen, which stretches from page 272 to page 287 of the American hardcover edition. In fact, this entire chapter is mostly one long excerpt, broken-up here and there by alterations of varying import and brevity. Sorry! How about if I post the next one quickly, both to compensate for the lack of new content here and to make-up for the delay in my getting out this update?

Harry sat there, aware that every head in the Great Hall had turned to look at him. He was stunned. He felt numb. He was surely dreaming. He had not heard correctly.

There was no applause. A buzzing, as though of angry bees, was starting to fill the Hall; some students were standing up to get a better look at Harry as he sat, frozen, in his seat.

Up at the top table, Professor McGonagall had got to her feet and swept past Ludo Bagman and Professor Karkaroff to whisper urgently to Professor Dumbledore, who bent his ear toward her, frowning slightly.

Harry turned to Draco and Crabbe and Goyle; beyond them, he saw the long Slytherin table watching him, openmouthed.

“I didn’t put my name in,” Harry said blankly. “You know I didn’t. And you were there when Bletchley tried for us, he didn’t even get a chance to try mine. It didn’t work. My name wasn’t in there.”

All three of them stared just as blankly back, Draco for once looking as dumbstruck as Crabbe and Goyle.

At the top table, Professor Dumbledore had straightened up, nodding to Professor McGonagall.

“Harry Potter!” he called again. “Harry! Up here, if you please!”

“Better—better go,” whispered Millicent Bulstrode, sounding numb.

It took Daphne pushing him out of his seat to get Harry to his feet. He trod on the hem of his robes and stumbled slightly. He set off down the gap between the Slytherin and Ravenclaw tables. It felt like an immensely long walk; the top table didn’t seem to be getting any nearer at all, and he could feel hundreds and hundreds of eyes upon him, as though each were a searchlight. The buzzing grew louder and louder. Someone very far away started to clap, and slowly a few other sets of hands joined in, but the weak applause died quickly in the oppressive silence from the rest of the Hall. After what seemed like an hour, he was right in front of Dumbledore, feeling the stares of all the teachers upon him.

“Well…through the door, Harry,” said Dumbledore. He wasn’t smiling.

Harry moved off along the teachers’ table. Hagrid was seated right at the end. He did not wink at Harry, or wave, or give any of his usual signs of greeting. He looked completely astonished and stared at Harry as he passed like everyone else. Harry went through the door out of the Great Hall and found himself in a smaller room, lined with paintings of witches and wizards. A handsome fire was roaring in the fireplace opposite him.

The faces in the portraits turned to look at him as he entered. He saw a wizened witch flit out of the frame of her picture and into the one next to it, which contained a wizard with a walrus mustache. The wizened witch started whispering in his ear.

Viktor Krum, Cedric Diggory, and Fleur Delacour were grouped around the fire. They looked strangely impressive, silhouetted against the flames. Krum, hunched-up and brooding, was leaning against the mantelpiece, slightly apart from the other two. Cedric was standing with his hands behind his back, staring into the fire. Fleur Delacour looked around when Harry walked in and threw back her sheet of long, silvery hair.

“What is it?” she said. “Do zey want us back in ze Hall?”

She thought he had come to deliver a message. Harry didn’t know how to explain what had just happened. He just stood there, looking at the three champions. It struck him how very tall all of them were.

There was a sound of scurrying feet behind him, and Ludo Bagman entered the room. He took Harry by the arm and led him forward.

“Extraordinary!” he muttered, squeezing Harry’s arm. “Absolutely extraordinary! Gentlemen…lady,” he added, approaching the fireside and addressing the other three. “May I introduce—incredible though it may seem—the _fourth_ Triwizard champion?”

Viktor Krum straightened up. His surly face darkened as he surveyed Harry. Cedric looked nonplussed. He looked from Bagman to Harry and back again as though sure he must have misheard what Bagman had said. Fleur Delacour, however, tossed her hair, smiling, and said, “Oh, vairy funny joke, Meester Bagman.”

“Joke?” Bagman repeated, bewildered. “No, no, not at all! Harry’s name just came out of the Goblet of Fire!”

Krum’s thick eyebrows contracted slightly. Cedric was still looking politely bewildered. Fleur frowned.

“But evidently zair ‘as been a mistake,” she said contemptuously to Bagman. “’E cannot compete. ‘E is too young.”

“Well…it is amazing,” said Bagman, rubbing his smooth chin and smiling down at Harry. “But, as you know, the age restriction was only imposed this year as an extra safety measure. And as his name’s come out of the goblet…I mean, I don’t think there can be any ducking out at this stage…. It’s down in the rules, you’re obliged…Harry will just have to do the best he—”

The door behind them opened again, and a large group of people came in: Professor Dumbledore, followed closely by Mr. Crouch, Professor Karkaroff, Madame Maxime, Professor McGonagall, and Professor Snape. Harry heard the buzzing of the hundreds of students on the other side of the wall, before Professor McGonagall closed the door.

“Madame Maxime!” said Fleur at once, striding over to her headmistress. “Zey are saying zat zis little boy is to compete also!”

Somewhere under Harry’s numb disbelief he felt a ripple of anger. _Little boy?_

Madame Maxime had drawn herself up to her full, and considerable, height. The top of her handsome head brushed the candle-filled chandelier, and her gigantic black satin bosom swelled.

“What is ze meaning of zis, Dumbly-dorr?” she said imperiously.

“I’d rather like to know that myself, Dumbledore,” said Professor Karkaroff. He was wearing a steely smile, and his blue eyes were like chips of ice. _“Two_ Hogwarts champions? I don’t remember anyone telling me the host school is allowed two champions—or have I not read the rules carefully enough?”

He gave a short and nasty laugh.

_“C’est impossible,”_ said Madame Maxime, whose enormous hand with its many superb opals was resting upon Fleur’s shoulder. “’Ogwarts cannot ‘ave two champions. It is most unjust.”

“We were under the impression that your Age Line would keep out younger contestants, Dumbledore,” said Karkaroff, his steely smile still in place, though his eyes were colder than ever. “Otherwise, we would, of course, have brought along a wider selection of candidates from our own schools.”

“One must consider the possibility of…unlikely circumstances where Potter is concerned, Karkaroff,” said Snape softly. His black eyes were alight with interest. “It is no fault of Dumbledore’s that uncanny events have a habit of following this boy. I am not even sure that it is necessarily Potter’s fault, sometimes….”

Harry looked hopefully at his Head of House but Snape said nothing more.

Professor Dumbledore was now looking down at Harry, who looked right back at him, trying to discern the expression of the eyes behind the half-moon spectacles.

“Did you put your name into the Goblet of Fire, Harry?” he asked calmly.

“No,” said Harry. He was very aware of everyone watching him closely. Snape in particular was studying him a way that made Harry feel much like an insect under a magnifying glass, his black eyes glittering suspiciously through his curtain of greasy black hair.

“Did you ask an older student to put it into the Goblet of Fire for you?” said Professor Dumbledore.

“I—well,” Harry stammered, “sort of, but it wasn’t my idea, and it didn’t work anyway,” he hurried to add, when several indrawn breaths told him that the other headmasters were about to start speaking. “I didn’t mean to,” he explained miserably, looking around in search of a friendly face. “I didn’t really _want_ to. It just—happened, sort of. And Ble—um, the student who was going to put our names in, he didn’t even get around to trying to put mine in, I swear!”

“Ah, but of course ‘e is lying!” cried Madame Maxime. Snape shook his head slowly, but made no argument aloud.

“I’m not,” Harry protested desperately. “The parchment turned into a—a sort of firework, and it chased Bletch—chased the person who was going to put our names in out of the Great Hall. He dropped my slip on the floor when he was running away, I saw it fall!”

“You see, ‘e admits zat ‘e tried to put ‘is name in ze goblet!”

“Tried and failed, apparently,” Snape clarified, his tone as inscrutable as his sallow face.

“It was a—a mistake,” Harry mumbled, but no one was listening to him anymore.

“He could not have crossed the Age Line,” said Professor McGonagall sharply. “I am sure we are all agreed on that—”

“Dumbly-dorr must ‘ave made a mistake wiz ze line,” said Madame Maxime, shrugging.

“It is possible, of course,” said Dumbledore politely.

“Dumbledore, you know perfectly well you did not make a mistake!” said Professor McGonagall angrily. “Really, what nonsense! Potter could not have crossed the line himself, and you have just heard him describe his failed attempt to have an older student enter his name for him—” She paused to glower at Harry and he gulped, getting the distinct feeling that if the situation had been any less fraught, he would have just lost fifty points for Slytherin. “He could not have known the precise reaction of the goblet to such attempted tampering unless he had witnessed it.”

“He needn’t have witnessed it happening to _himself_ ,” Karkaroff pointed-out nastily. “I’m sure plenty of students attempted to bribe or bully someone older into putting their names in for them.”

“I didn’t see it happen to anyone else,” Harry insisted, feeling panicky. “I was in Hagrid’s hut all morning, and the library all afternoon, until right before the feast. You can ask my friends—Draco Malfoy and Vincent Crabbe and Gregory Goyle—they were with me the whole time, they would have seen if I’d gone anywhere near the goblet!”

Karkaroff looked startled, rocking back on his heels and then peering in at Harry for a closer look.

“I do not believe that Potter is a good enough liar to be this convincing if he were making up a story,” Snape said coldly. He arched an eyebrow and added, “Not by himself, anyway.”

Harry looked at Snape pleadingly, silently begging the Potions Master to believe him.

Karkaroff shook his head and stepped back. “Mr. Crouch…Mr. Bagman,” he said, his voice unctuous once more, “you are our—er—objective judges. Surely you will agree that this is most irregular?”

Bagman wiped his round, boyish face with his handkerchief and looked at Mr. Crouch, who was standing outside the circle of the firelight, his face half hidden in shadow. He looked slightly eerie, the half darkness making him look much older, giving him an almost skull-like appearance. When he spoke, however, it was in his usual curt voice.

“We must follow the rules, and the rules state clearly that those people whose names come out of the Goblet of Fire are bound to compete in the tournament.”

“Well, Barty knows the rule book back to front,” said Bagman, beaming and turning back to Karkaroff and Madame Maxime, as though the matter was now closed.

“I insist upon resubmitting the names of the rest of my students,” said Karkaroff. He had dropped his unctuous tone and his smile now. His face wore a very ugly look indeed. “You will set up the Goblet of Fire once more, and we will continue adding names until each school has two champions. It’s only fair, Dumbledore.”

“But Karkaroff, it doesn’t work like that,” said Bagman. “The Goblet of Fire’s just gone out—it won’t reignite until the start of the next tournament—”

“—in which Durmstrang will most certainly not be competing!” exploded Karkaroff. “After all our meetings and negotiations and compromises, I little expected something of this nature to occur! I have half a mind to leave now!”

“Empty threat, Karkaroff!” growled a voice from near the door. “You can’t leave your champion now. He’s got to compete. They’ve all got to compete. Binding magical contract, like Dumbledore said. Convenient, eh?”

Moody had just entered the room. He limped toward the fire, and with every right step he took, there was a loud _clunk_.

“Convenient?” said Karkaroff. “I’m afraid I don’t understand you, Moody.”

Harry could tell he was trying to sound disdainful, as though what Moody was saying was barely worth his notice, but his hands gave him away; they had balled themselves into fists.

“Don’t you?” said Moody quietly. “It’s very simple, Karkaroff. Someone put Potter’s name in that goblet knowing he’d have to compete if it came out.”

“Evidently, someone ‘oo wished to give ‘Ogwarts two bites at ze apple!” said Madame Maxime.

“I quite agree, Madame Maxime,” said Karkaroff, bowing to her. “I shall be lodging complaints with the Ministry of Magic _and_ the International Confederation of Wizards—”

“If anyone’s got reason to complain, it’s Potter,” growled Moody, “but…funny thing…I don’t hear _him_ saying a word….”

“Why should ‘e complain?” burst out Fleur Delacour, stamping her foot. “’E ‘as ze chance to compete, ‘asn’t ‘e? We ‘ave all been ‘oping to be chosen for weeks and weeks! Ze honor for our schools! A thousand Galleons in prize money—zis is a chance many would die for!”

“Maybe someone’s hoping Potter _is_ going to die for it,” said Moody, with the merest trace of a growl.

An extremely tense silence followed these words. Ludo Bagman, who was looking very anxious indeed, bounced nervously up and down on his feet and said, “Moody, old man…what a thing to say!”

“We all know Professor Moody considers the morning wasted if he hasn’t discovered six plots to murder him before lunchtime,” said Karkaroff loudly. “Apparently he is now teaching his students to fear assassination too. An odd quality in a Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, Dumbledore, but no doubt you have your reasons.”

“Imagining things, am I?” growled Moody. “Seeing things, eh? It was a skilled witch or wizard who put the boy’s name in that goblet….”

“Ah, what evidence is zere of zat?” said Madame Maxime, throwing up her huge hands.

“Because they hoodwinked a very powerful magical object!” said Moody. “It would have needed an exceptionally strong Confundus Charm to bamboozle that goblet into forgetting that only three schools compete in the tournament…. I’m guessing they submitted Potter’s name under a fourth school, to make sure he was the only one in his category….”

“You seem to have given this a great deal of thought, Moody,” said Karkaroff coldly, “and a very ingenious theory it is—thought of course, I heard you recently got it into your head that one of your birthday presents contained a cunningly disguised basilisk egg, and smashed it to pieces before you realized it was a carriage clock. So you’ll understand if we don’t take you entirely seriously….”

“There are those who’ll turn innocent occasions to their advantage,” Moody retorted in a menacing voice. “It’s my job to think the way Dark wizards do, Karkaroff—as you ought to remember….”

“Alastor!” said Dumbledore warningly. Harry wondered for a moment whom he was speaking to, but then realized “Mad-Eye” could hardly be Moody’s real first name. Moody fell silent, though still surveying Karkaroff with satisfaction—Karkaroff’s face was burning.

“How this situation arose, we do not know,” said Dumbledore, speaking to everyone gathered in the room. “It seems to me, however, that we have no choice but to accept it. Both Cedric and Harry have been chosen to compete in the tournament. This, therefore, they will do….”

“Ah, but Dumbly-dorr—”

“My dear Madame Maxime, if you have an alternative, I would be delighted to hear it.”

Dumbledore waited, but Madame Maxime did not speak, she merely glared. She wasn’t the only one either. Snape’s eyes were still narrowed in suspicion; Karkaroff looked livid; Bagman, however, looked rather excited.

“Well, shall we crack on, then?” he said, rubbing his hands together and smiling around the room. “Got to give our champions their instructions, haven’t we? Barty, want to do the honors?”

Mr. Crouch seemed to come out of a deep reverie.

“Yes,” he said, “instructions. Yes…the first task…”

He moved forward into the firelight. Close up, Harry thought he looked ill. There were dark shadows beneath his eyes and a thin, papery look about his wrinkled skin that had not been there at the Quidditch World Cup.

“The first task is designed to test your daring,” he told Harry, Cedric, Fleur, and Viktor, “so we are not going to be telling you what it is. Courage in the face of the unknown is an important quality in a wizard…very important….

“The first task will take place on November the twenty-fourth, in front of the other students and the panel of judges.

“The champions are not permitted to ask for or accept help of any kind from their teachers to complete the tasks in the tournament. The champions will face the first challenge armed only with their wands. They will receive information about the second task when the first is over. Owing to the demanding and time-consuming nature of the tournament, the champions are exempted from end-of-year tests.”

Mr. Crouch turned to look at Dumbledore.

“I think that’s all, is it, Albus?”

“I think so,” said Dumbledore, who was looking at Mr. Crouch with mild concern. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to stay at Hogwarts tonight, Barty?”

“No, Dumbledore, I must get back to the Ministry,” said Mr. Crouch. “It is a very busy, very difficult time at the moment…. I’ve left young Weatherby in charge…. Very enthusiastic…a little overenthusiastic, if truth be told….”

“You’ll come and have a drink before you go, at least?” said Dumbledore.

“Come on, Barty, I’m staying!” said Bagman brightly. “It’s all happening at Hogwarts now, you know, much more exciting here than at the office!”

“I think not, Ludo,” said Crouch with a touch of his old impatience.

“Professor Karkaroff—Madame Maxime—a nightcap?” said Dumbledore.

But Madame Maxime had already put her arm around Fleur’s shoulders and was leading her swiftly out of the room. Harry could hear them both talking very fast in French as they went off into the Great Hall. Karkaroff beckoned to Krum, and they, too, exited, though in silence.

“Harry, Cedric, I suggest you go down to bed,” said Dumbledore, smiling at both of them. “I am sure Slytherin and Hufflepuff are waiting to celebrate with you, and it would be a shame to deprive them of this excellent excuse to make a great deal of mess and noise.”

Harry glanced at Cedric, who nodded, and they left together.

The Great Hall was deserted now; the candles had burned low, giving the jagged smiles of the pumpkins an eerie, flickering quality.

“So,” said Cedric, with a slight smile. “We’re playing against each other again!”

“I s’pose,” said Harry. He really couldn’t think of anything to say. The inside of his head seemed to be in complete disarray, as though his brain had been ransacked.

“So…tell me…” said Cedric as they reached the entrance hall, which was now lit only by torches in the absence of the Goblet of Fire. “How _did_ you get your name in?”

“I didn’t,” said Harry, staring up at him. “I didn’t put it in. I was telling the truth.”

“Ah…okay,” said Cedric. Harry could tell Cedric didn’t believe him.

They started down the stairs together and Harry shook his head. “It wasn’t even my idea to ask Bletchley to put it in for me, that was all Draco,” he continued. He wasn’t as worried about admitting the details to Cedric as he had been to all those teachers; while Cedric was a prefect, Harry didn’t think he was the sort to squeal on somebody if he hadn’t seen the rule-breaking himself. “It was Draco who really wanted to enter,” Harry explained miserably. “I just…went along with it, but it didn’t work anyway. I don’t know how my name got in there.”

“All right,” said Cedric, although he still didn’t sound convinced.

Harry sighed. Was anyone except Draco and Hermione going to believe him, or would they all think he’d put himself in for the tournament? Well, Crabbe and Goyle would side with him of course, but they would have believed Draco if he told them the sky was made of jelly; convincing them that Harry hadn’t tried to enter would be easy. Yet how could anyone think that he had wanted this, when he was facing competitors who’d had three years’ more magical education than he had—when he was now facing tasks that not only sounded very dangerous, but which were to be performed in front of hundreds of people? Yes, he’d thought about it…he’d fantasized about it…he’d even gone along with Draco’s attempt to get their names in, but only because he hadn’t been able to think of a graceful way to decline…he’d never really, _seriously_ considered entering, and he’d been relieved when Bletchley had failed….

But someone else had considered it…someone else had wanted him in the tournament, and had made sure he was entered. Why? To give him a treat? He didn’t think so, somehow….

To see him make a fool of himself? Well, they were likely to get their wish….

But to get him _killed?_

Was Moody just being his usual paranoid self? Couldn’t someone have put Harry’s name in the goblet as a trick, a practical joke? He didn’t think it had been the Weasley twins, for once; if they had been able to figure out how to get an underage student’s name in, surely they would have started with their own. But if it wasn’t a joke—did someone really want him dead?

Harry was able to answer that at once. Yes, someone wanted him dead, someone had wanted him dead ever since he had been a year old…Lord Voldemort. But how could Voldemort have ensured that Harry’s name got into the Goblet of Fire? Voldemort was supposed to be far away, in some distant country, in hiding, alone…feeble and powerless….

Yet in that dream he had had, just before he had awoken with his scar hurting, Voldemort had not been alone…he had been talking to Wormtail…plotting Harry’s murder….

Harry got a shock to find himself facing the tapestry at the end of the hall that held the secret entrance to the Slytherin common room. With a sigh of annoyance he backtracked to the appropriate section of stone and delivered the password that caused the wall to grind open, revealing the arched entrance to his dungeon common room.

The blast of noise that met Harry’s ears when the wall opened almost knocked him backward. Next thing he knew, he was being wrenched inside the common room by about a dozen pairs of hands, and was facing the whole of Slytherin House, all of whom were screaming, applauding, and whistling.

“You hoodwinked old Dumbledore but good!” Montague roared, clapping Harry on the back.

“You’d better not have talked me into dropping your name in there after you’d already done it yourself just to watch me get made a fool of,” Bletchley said; he looked half annoyed, half deeply impressed.

“How did you pull it off without sprouting a beard?” asked Taylor Alden, Harry’s onetime Christmas companion, grinning broadly.

“I didn’t,” Harry said. “I don’t know how—”

But Pansy and Daphne had now come over, squealing and clutching his arms. “Diggory won’t know what hit him!” Pansy cackled, while Daphne just repeated, “A Slytherin champion, a Slytherin champion!” over and over while her little sister clapped her hands and bounced up and down on her toes beside her, beaming.

“If Diggory’s smart he’ll just drop out now,” Warrington crowed. “He never stood a chance in Quidditch, he won’t stand a chance in this either!”

“We got candy and stuff,” Goyle said, waving Harry forward. “Come eat.”

“I’m not hungry, I had enough at the feast—”

But nobody wanted to hear that he wasn’t hungry; nobody wanted to hear that he hadn’t put his name in the goblet; not one single person seemed to have noticed that he wasn’t at all in the mood to celebrate…. Lilian Moon had come up with a paper crown from somewhere, and insisted on settling it on Harry’s head. Harry couldn’t get away; whenever he tried to sidle over to the staircase down to the dormitories, the crowd around him closed ranks, forcing another cauldron cake on him, stuffing peppermint toads and licorice wands into his hands…. Everyone wanted to know how he had done it, how he had tricked Dumbledore’s Age Line and managed to get his name into the goblet….

“I didn’t,” he said, over and over again, “I don’t know how it happened.”

But for all the notice anyone took, he might just as well not have answered at all.

“I’m tired!” he bellowed finally, after nearly an hour. “No, seriously, Pansy—I’m going to bed—”

He wanted more than anything to find Draco, to find a bit of sanity, but he didn’t seem to be in the common room. Insisting that he needed to sleep, and almost flattening Astoria and two of her friends as they attempted to waylay him at the top of the stairs, Harry managed to shake everyone off and climb down to the dormitory as fast as he could.

To his great relief, he found Draco was lying on his bed in the otherwise empty dormitory, reading through his Transfiguration textbook. He looked up when Harry slammed the door behind him.

“Where’ve you been?” Harry said.

“Nowhere special,” Draco said. His face was cold and closed. Harry suddenly became aware that he was still wearing Lilian’s crown. He hastened to take it off and started tearing it into pieces.

Draco lay on the bed without moving, his book open in front of him, watching Harry shred the crown.

“I suppose you deserve congratulations,” he said, when Harry had let the last piece of torn paper flutter to the floor.

“What d’you mean, congratulations?” said Harry, staring at Draco. There was definitely something wrong with the hard, frozen expression on his face. His pale eyes looked red-rimmed, probably from the strain of reading without putting enough lights on.

He raised an eyebrow. “For outwitting the Age Line, of course. Well done. How did you pull it off?” Draco’s eyes flickered to Harry’s trunk. “Was it the Invisibility Cloak? I can’t think what else _you_ could have come up with on your own, but you do tend to default to that cloak whenever you want something. I should have thought of it sooner myself, I suppose, but most invisibility cloaks would be useless on an Age Line….”

Harry shook his head. “I didn’t use the cloak,” he said. “I didn’t use anything.”

“Right.” Draco’s other eyebrow came up to join the first. “Someone else figured out a way to get your name in that goblet, someone more competent than Bletchley, and just entered you out of the goodness of their heart, is that it?”

“I don’t know,” said Harry, “maybe. Listen—”

“No,” Draco interrupted, “I think I’m done listening to you.”

“What—what do you mean?” said Harry, feeling his stomach lurch.

Draco’s eyes were as pale and as cold as a snowfall. “I suppose this is all of a piece with you, isn’t it?

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Harry growled.

Draco shrugged idly, although there was nothing lackadaisical about the sharp look on his pale, pointed face. “It means you haven’t any sense of decency, and you never have. I don’t know why I’m surprised to find you acting so selfish now. I mean, I would have thought that the least you could do would be to let me share the chance, since you stole my position on the Quidditch team after I went to all the effort of making sure you had a broom—but what’s gratitude to someone like you? Blaise was right all along.”

Draco glowered for another moment, then ducked his head back into his book and pretended to read. Harry knew he was just pretending, because several minutes passed in between each page turn, and not even Goyle read that slowly. Harry stared at him, a cold fury uncoiling in his guts. Finally he climbed into bed himself and wrenched the emerald curtains closed, cutting off his view of one of the few people he had been sure would believe him.


	15. The Weighing of the Wands

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This section contains several brief excerpts from Chapter Eighteen, stretching from page 288 to 312 of the American hardcover. It also skips over a lengthy section near the end of the chapter, as that segment of the story would have been relatively unchanged from canon, and repeating it all serves little point. If you are having trouble remembering the specifics of the missing scene, please consult the original text. The redacted part begins in the book with Colin’s departure midway down page 302 and continues nearly until the end of the chapter.

When Harry woke up on Sunday morning, it took him a moment to remember why he felt so miserable and worried. Then the memory of the previous night rolled over him. He sat up and ripped back the curtains of his own four-poster, intending to talk to Draco, to force Draco to believe him—only to find that Draco’s bed was empty; he had obviously gone up to breakfast, and Crabbe and Goyle with him.

Harry dressed and went up the narrow staircase into the common room. The moment he appeared, the people who had already finished breakfast broke into applause again. The prospect of going up into the Great Hall again and facing the rest of the Slytherins, all treating him like some sort of hero, was not inviting; it was that, however, or stay here and allow himself to be cornered by the other members of the Slytherin Quidditch team, who were walking toward him with big grins on their faces.

Harry forced himself to smile at them and fled through the stone archway and up the stairs. His arrival into the Great Hall was every bit as miserable as he had expected: the Slytherins hooted and cheered and all tried to wave him toward the nearest empty seat. The rest of the student body turned their backs, almost as one, and proceeded to talk very loudly about Cedric Diggory.

Harry’s heart gave a little lurch when he caught sight of Draco. For a moment their eyes met across the table, Draco’s glittering coldly; then he gave Harry a thin smile and ordered Crabbe to move over and make room for him to sit with them.

With a feeling of great relief, Harry hurried over to join his friends, impatiently shaking off the congratulatory claps on the back and handshakes the rest of their housemates tried to foist on him as he passed.

“I swear I didn’t put my name in the goblet,” he said, swinging his leg over the bench. “I swear it wasn’t me, I wouldn’t have—”

“Sure, sure,” Draco said loftily, “whatever you say. Let’s just forget all that last night, all right?”

Harry would have happily forgotten everything from the point after which the Goblet of Fire had spat out Cedric’s name, and said as much.

Draco smirked at him. “Well, I don’t think you’ve got that option, so how about instead, you tell us everything that happened after you went into the staff room? What did Dumbledore say? What did _Snape_ say? They are going to let you compete, right?”

Harry related the whole story, from Fleur’s disbelief to Karkaroff’s fury, including Moody’s paranoia. When he mentioned that someone might have put his name in the goblet in some kind of plot to hurt him—it felt too melodramatic to say _kill_ —the cool, eager expression on Draco’s face faltered for a moment.

“But that—that’s ridiculous,” he said. “Mad-Eye really _is_ mad. The idea of someone giving you a chance to compete in the Triwizard Tournament because they’re hoping it will be a _bad_ thing for you is preposterous!”

“Prep-us-trus,” Goyle repeated, nodding firmly. “Yeah, you’re gonna win, so that’d be a stupid plan.”

Goyle’s dumb confidence did little to lessen the tight feeling in Harry’s chest, but he smiled anyway. “Thanks, Gregory,” he said.

Goyle grunted, swallowed half a sausage, and said, “N’prob’m.”

“Well the real question is,” Harry said, “who _did_ put my name in?”

“ _Is_ that the question?” Draco’s voice was a sarcastic drawl, his lips curled in a smirk.

Harry glared at him. “Yeah, it is,” he said firmly. “Because I think we proved yesterday that it couldn’t have been a student. Moody said it would have taken a really powerful witch or wizard, someone who could cast a Confundus Charm strong enough to make the goblet think there were four schools, instead of just three. That rules out pretty much everyone but the teachers, but….”

“Could have been Karkaroff, if you really think somebody did it to hurt you,” Draco suggested, although his tone was dubious.

Harry paused, then shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, “Karkaroff seemed _really_ mad. Too mad to be faking it, I think.”

“Maybe he’s just that good a liar,” Draco said. He shrugged. “Some people are.”

“Maybe,” said Harry, but without conviction.

“Well, look at it from the other way around,” Draco said impatiently. “If it was someone who thought they were doing something nice for you, who could it have been?”

 “Still nobody,” Harry said. “If it had been _your_ name, I’d think Snape, but me?” He shook his head again. “There’s no one.”

“Moody’s prob’ly right,” Crabbe said, around a mouthful of eggs and soldiers. He swallowed and continued, “It was probably someone wanted to see you make a fool of yourself.”

“Or worse,” Harry muttered darkly. He stabbed a stewed tomato so hard it jumped off his plate and rolled away down the table.

“Whatever,” said Draco. “The important thing is, you’re in the tournament now, and it doesn’t sound like anybody is going to be able to stop you competing.”

“You’re right,” Harry said. He shook his head grimly, too busy stabbing at the eggs on his plate to notice the way Draco beamed at all the other Slytherins watching them.

After breakfast they went for a walk outside at Harry’s insistence, to get away from the other students, who were continuing to stare at Harry like he was either a hero or a monster. Draco sent Crabbe and Goyle to fetch everyone’s cloaks because Harry flat-out refused to return to the common room, and Draco refused to go out into the cold without one.

Harry felt awkward, waiting in the entrance hall by the doors, trying to avoid the eyes of everyone from Durmstrang and Beauxbatons as they walked past him into the Great Hall. Fortunately most of them didn’t seem to recognize him; either that or they were just in too much of a hurry to get to breakfast to pay attention. He tried to flatten his fringe over his forehead to hide his telltale scar but as usual, his hair had a mind of its own. By the time he gave up, it felt like most of it was sticking straight up, leaving his entire forehead exposed.

Harry sighed and led the way outside.

Halfway down the steps, he heard someone calling his name: “Harry! _Harry!”_

Hermione Granger came jogging after him, Ron Weasley on her heels.

Harry and the others paused to let the two Gryffindors catch up. Harry pretended not to hear what Draco muttered under his breath, or to see the way his lip curled at the sight of the S.P.E.W. badges they were both wearing.

“Harry, what were you _thinking?”_ Hermione demanded the moment she reached his side. Her face was drawn and pale with worry. “Don’t you realize how _dangerous_ what you’ve done is?”

“I didn’t put my name in the goblet,” Harry snapped.

Hermione looked taken aback. “But—”

“I said it wasn’t me. I didn’t put my name in.” Harry glowered at her.

Hermione frowned. “But you—” she started again.

“Leave it,” Ron told her.

“But he _had_ to have—”

Ron shook his head. “Why would Potter lie?” he asked bluntly. “He’s not getting in trouble for it anyway, so what would be the point in pretending?”

Harry felt a sudden, strange rush of gratitude toward Ron Weasley. “Exactly,” he said. “Thank you.”

Ron shrugged. “S’no big deal,” he muttered. “It’s just sense.”

“Hmm,” said Draco, “I’m shocked.”

Ron turned toward him, glaring, but before the two of them could start fighting, Harry said quickly, “Dumbledore and Moody don’t think I could have put my name in, even if I’d tried.”

“ _We_ did try,” Draco said, “and it didn’t work—so….”

“But who—who would put your name in for you?” Hermione asked, looking bewildered.

“Somebody tryin’ to hurt him,” Goyle said simply. “That’s what he told us Moody said, anyway.”

“What?” gasped Hermione.

So for the second time that morning, Harry had to tell the story of exactly what had happened after he had left the Slytherin table the night before. They walked as he spoke, the six of them striding across the lawn toward the lake, where the Durmstrang ship was moored, reflected blackly in the water. It was a chilly morning, and Harry was glad that Draco had insisted on getting their cloaks before coming outside. Hermione and Ron were both soon shivering, although neither of them suggested going back inside or stopping Harry’s tale. He kept it shorter, not eager to repeat every little detail, but by the time he was done they were both frowning.

“I think you probably ought to write to Sirius again,” Hermione said.

“Write to Sirius?” Harry repeated. “What for?” Of course, he hadn’t told Hermione about Sirius’s most recent letter, but Harry was in no hurry to write to his godfather again and risk getting him in any more trouble. He was about to tell Hermione as much, but then Draco said suddenly, “That’s actually not a bad idea, Granger.”

Harry gaped at his friend, feeling betrayed.

Draco raised his eyebrows. “He did ask to be told if anything happened,” he pointed out, “and I would say this definitely counts as something.”

“Come off it,” said Harry, looking around to check that they couldn’t be overheard, but the grounds were quite deserted. “He came back to the country just because my scar twinged. He’ll probably come bursting right into the castle again if I tell him someone’s entered me in the Triwizard Tournament—”

“Well he’s going to find out eventually,” Draco laughed. “You don’t think this is going to be in the _Daily Prophet?_ I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s already in this morning’s edition, and it will certainly be in by this evening.”

“He’s right,” Hermione said, earning herself a dark look from Draco, which she ignored. “This tournament’s famous, and you’re famous…. You’re already in half the books about You-Know-Who, you know…and Sirius would rather hear it from you, I know he would.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll write to him,” said Harry, glaring at both of them. “But I’m not telling him what Moody said. He’s probably just being paranoid anyway, and Sirius is jumpy enough already.”

“He’ll probably be able to connect the dots on his own,” Draco murmured. Harry pretended not to hear him.

He led the way back toward the castle, the others falling in behind. Crabbe and Goyle started a shoving match in the rear of the little group, but Harry and Draco were used enough to that method of entertainment to ignore it. Ron looked over his shoulder a few times nervously, as though worried that he would become their next target, but Hermione just rolled her eyes and walked a little closer to Harry and Draco.

“Whose owl am I going to use?” Harry said as they climbed the stairs. “He told me not to use Hedwig again.”

“You can use Bowman,” Draco offered. “I wrote to my parents just last night, so they won’t expect another letter for a few days—and I suppose I can always use a school owl if I need to get in touch.”

“Thanks,” said Harry.

“You named your owl Bowman?” Ron asked. “After the bloke who invented the Golden Snitch?”

“So?” said Draco, narrowing his eyes suspiciously.

“Good name,” said Ron. He sounded surprised.

They went up to the Owlery. Hermione had her school bag with her, so she gave Harry a piece of parchment, a quill, and a bottle of ink. She and Ron strolled around the long lines of perches, looking at all the different owls, while Harry sat down against a wall and wrote his letter. Draco leaned against the wall and looked over Harry’s shoulder, offering commentary, while Crabbe and Goyle took turns getting their fingers bit as they attempted to see who could annoy a grumpy old horned owl on one of the lower perches the most.

Harry wrote:

> _Dear Sirius,_
> 
> _You told me to keep you posted on what’s happening at Hogwarts, so here goes—I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the Triwizard Tournament’s happening this year and on Saturday night I got picked as a fourth champion. I don’t know who put my name in the Goblet of Fire, because I didn’t. The other Hogwarts champion is Cedric Diggory, from Hufflepuff._

“What are you telling him that for?” Draco demanded. “You don’t think he’ll care?”

Harry paused at this point, thinking, and shot Draco a glare. He had an urge to say something about the large weight of anxiety that seemed to have settled inside his chest since last night, but he couldn’t think how to translate this into words, and he didn’t want to try with Draco watching him, so he simply dipped his quill back into the ink bottle and wrote,

> _Hope you’re okay—_ _Harry_

“Finished,” he told the others, getting to his feet and brushing straw off his robes. At this, Hedwig came fluttering down onto his shoulder and held out her leg.

“I can’t use you,” Harry told her, looking around for Draco’s owl. “I’ve got to use Bowman….”

At the sound of his name, Bowman soared out of the rafters, and landed on a perch nearby. He tilted his head inquisitively at Draco, who nodded.

Hedwig gave a very loud hoot and took off so suddenly that her talons cut into Harry’s shoulder. She kept her back to him all the time he was tying his letter to the leg of Draco’s eagle owl. When Bowman had flown off, Harry reached out to stroke Hedwig, but she clicked her beak furiously and soared up into the rafters out of reach.

“Fine, be like that,” Harry said angrily. “I didn't ask for any of this, you know!”

If Harry had thought that matters would improve once everyone got used to the idea of him being champion, the following day showed how mistaken he was. He could no longer hide at the Slytherin table, or out on the grounds, once he was back at lessons—and it was clear that the rest of the school, just like the Slytherins, thought Harry had entered himself for the tournament. Unlike the Slytherins, however, they did not seem impressed.

It was no surprise that the Hufflepuffs were furious with Harry, although he was mildly surprised to realize that they seemed to be taking their feelings out on the rest of Slytherin House too. It was plain they felt that Harry had stolen their champion’s glory; a feeling exacerbated, perhaps, by the fact that Hufflepuff House very rarely got any glory, and that Cedric was one of the few who had ever given them any, having led their Quidditch team to several victories. Harry was glad that the only class they shared regularly with the Hufflepuffs was Astronomy; spending one midnight a week with their dark muttering and darker looks was more than enough time spent in proximity to such vitriol.

He would have been looking forward to seeing Hagrid under normal circumstances, but Care of Magical Creatures meant seeing the Gryffindors too—the first time he would come face-to-face with them since becoming champion.

Predictably, Seamus Finnigan and Dean Thomas lost no time in finding a reason to laugh at Harry, although for once Ron Weasley did not join in on their banter.

“Ooh, Potter, ooh would you sign my face?” Finnigan asked, fluttering his eyelashes.

“Ooh Potter, you’re such a champion,” Thomas added, fanning himself melodramatically. “Be still my heart! I so love a lost cause, you know?”

“Can’t get much more lost than that,” Finnigan chortled, and Patil and Brown burst into giggles. “How long do you reckon he’ll make it?”

“I asked my sister to run the numbers with Professor Vector,” Patil said smugly, “and she says the odds of the fourth champion making it as far as the second task are about one in a trillion.”

“That isn’t even how Arithmancy works,” Hermione said, sounding scandalized, but she had to stop there, because Hagrid emerged from the back of his cabin balancing a teetering tower of crates, each containing a very large Blast-Ended Skrewt. To the class’s horror, Hagrid proceeded to explain that the reason the skrewts had been killing one another was an excess of pent-up energy, and that the solution would be for each student to fix a leash on a skrewt and take it for a short walk. The only good thing about this plan was that it distracted Finnigan and Thomas completely.

“Take a skrewt on a walk?” Finnigan gaped. “All right, brilliant!”

“Where do we put the leash?” Thomas asked, eyeing the nearest skrewt speculatively.

“Roun’ the middle,” said Hagrid, demonstrating. “Er—yeh might want ter put on yer dragon-hide gloves, jus’ as an extra precaution, like. Harry—you come here an’ help me with this big one….”

Hagrid’s real intention, however, was to talk to Harry away from the rest of the class. He waited until everyone else had set off with their skrewts, then turned to Harry and said, very seriously, “So—yer competin’, Harry. In the tournament. School champion.”

Harry didn’t bother to point out that Hogwarts actually had two champions. He doubted that Hagrid had brought him over here to talk about Cedric Diggory.

Hagrid’s beetle-black eyes looked very anxious under his wild eyebrows.

“No idea who put yeh in fer it, Harry?”

“You believe I didn’t do it, then?” said Harry, concealing with difficulty the rush of gratitude he felt at Hagrid’s words.

“’Course I do,” Hagrid grunted. “Yeh say it wasn’ you, an’ I believe yeh—an’ Dumbledore believes yer, an’ all.”

“Wish I knew who _did_ do it,” said Harry bitterly.

The pair of them looked out over the lawn; the class was widely scattered now, and all in great difficulty. The skrewts were now over three feet long, and extremely powerful. No longer shell-less and colorless, they had developed a kind of thick, grayish, shiny armor. They looked like a cross between giant scorpions and elongated crabs—but still without recognizable heads or eyes. They had become immensely strong and very hard to control.

“Look like they’re havin’ fun, don’ they?” Hagrid said happily. Harry assumed he was talking about the skrewts, because his classmates certainly weren’t; every now and then, with an alarming _bang_ , one of the skrewts’ ends would explode, causing it to shoot forward several yards, and more than one person was being dragged along on their stomach, trying desperately to get back on their feet. Even Finnigan looked like he wished he was elsewhere, now.

“Ah, I don’ know, Harry,” Hagrid sighed suddenly, looking back down at him with a worried expression on his face. “School champion…everythin’ seems ter happen ter you, doesn’ it?”

Harry didn’t answer. Yes, everything did seem to happen to him…that was more or less what Snape had implied in the staff room and that was the reason, Harry was sure, that someone else was trying to kill him.

 

The next few days were some of Harry’s worst at Hogwarts. The closest he had ever come to feeling like this had been during those months, in his second year, when a large part of the school had suspected him of attacking his fellow students. Even Hermione had thought that he was the Heir of Slytherin, and had believed that Harry was targeting her specifically. At least he had the support of all of his friends this time, as well that of his housemates, but Harry thought sometimes he would just as soon have forgone the accolades and congratulations of the Slytherins, since they only seemed to make everyone else dislike him more.

It didn’t help that Draco was still sulking periodically; while he was generally enjoying the reflected admiration of being best friends with the Slytherin champion, anytime their housemates fawned over Harry when Draco wasn’t around to enjoy the attention and he caught wind of it later, he would bury his face in one of his textbooks for an hour or two, scowling ferociously, until Harry could think of some distraction to pull him out of his funk. It was tiring, but Harry remembered how miserable he had been, briefly, last year when Draco had decided to avoid him because he was afraid they would both be murdered, and he gritted his teeth, and he made himself do it.

He could understand the Hufflepuffs’ attitude, even if he didn’t like it; they had their own champion to support. He expected nothing less than vicious insults from the Gryffindors—he was highly unpopular there and always had been, because he had helped Slytherin beat them so often, both at Quidditch and in the Inter-House Championship. But he had hoped the Ravenclaws might have found it in their hearts to support him as much as Cedric. He was wrong, however. Most Ravenclaws seemed to think that he had been desperate to earn himself a bit more fame by tricking the goblet into accepting his name.

Then there was the fact that Cedric looked the part of a champion so much more than he did. Exceptionally handsome, with his straight nose, dark hair, and gray eyes, it was hard to say who was receiving more attention these days, Cedric or Viktor Krum. Harry actually saw a group of sixth-year girls begging Cedric to sign their school bags one lunchtime.

Meanwhile there was no reply from Sirius, Hedwig was refusing to come anywhere near him, Professor Trelawney was predicting his death with even more certainty than usual, and he did so badly at Summoning Charms in Professor Flitwick’s class that he was given extra homework—the only person to get any, apart from Goyle, although Theodore complained darkly that Pansy ought to at least have extra lessons on targeting. While she had proved adept at drawing objects to her, her aim seemed to list to the left, so that more often than not she had summoned whatever Theodore had been holding rather than what she should have been aiming for. Now Daphne and Millicent were teasing her about being too interested in scrawny, rabbity Theodore to pay attention to what she was summoning. It was hard to say who was more outraged by the idea, Pansy or Theodore himself.

Harry chuckled as he followed the giggling girls out of Flitwick’s classroom.

“It’s actually quite a simple spell,” Draco bragged—he had been making objects zoom across the room to him all lesson, as though he were some sort of weird magnet for board dusters, wastepaper baskets, and lunascopes. “Even Crabbe could do it, sort of. You just need to pull your head out of your bum long enough to focus, Harry.”

“Wonder why I’m having trouble with that,” said Harry darkly as Cedric Diggory walked past, surrounded by a large group of simpering girls, all of whom looked at Harry as though he were a particularly large Blast-Ended Skrewt. “Still—never mind, eh? Double Potions to look forward to this afternoon….”

Potions was one of Harry’s least favorite classes (although he knew Draco wouldn’t catch the sarcasm, it being his all-time favorite) and having a double session had never been his idea of fun, but these days it was nothing short of torture. Being shut in a dungeon for an hour and a half with the Gryffindors, all of whom, save for Hermione—and oddly, Ron Weasley—seemed determined to punish Harry as much as possible for daring to become school champion, was about the most unpleasant thing Harry could imagine. He was glad at least that it wasn’t any other class; with Snape there to glower at them, the Gryffindors didn’t dare actually _do_ anything, and could only whisper insults when the teacher was out of earshot. The tension in the room was still palpable and Harry had a hard enough time concentrating on brewing to begin with. He had already struggled through one Friday’s worth, with Draco sneering cold retorts on his behalf and Hermione sniffing disapprovingly, and he couldn’t see why today should be any better.

They filed into the classroom, Harry following Draco to their usual seat in the front row and trying to ignore it as the Gryffindors “accidentally” jostled their table on their way to their own seats. “Very mature!” Hermione told Seamus Finnigan as he hip-checked Harry’s bag to the floor, which earned her a rude gesture from Finnigan and scowls from the other Gryffindor girls. Harry would have liked to tell Hermione to stop defending him—she was doing herself no favors with her housemates, siding with him—but he couldn’t bring himself to give up the comfort of having somebody (other than Draco, who more often than not made things worse) speak-up on his behalf.

Professor Snape swept into the room in a swirl of black robes and the sudden, sharp silence that always descended on a class when he walked in. “Antidotes!” he said, looking around at them all, his cold black eyes glittering anticipatorily. “You should all have prepared your recipes by now. I want you to brew them carefully, and then, we will be selecting someone on whom to test one….”

Snape’s eyes met Harry’s, and for a moment, Harry was afraid that Snape was going to choose _him_ —but then he turned to survey the Gryffindors, and Harry breathed a sigh of relief. He had worked hard on his antidote, he knew he had, but he wasn’t confident enough in his potioneering skills to be comfortable relying on them to save his life. He looked at the side of the room where the Gryffindors were sitting, and for a moment felt a pang of guilt: Snape had come to stop in front of the table that Ron was sharing with Neville Longbottom, and both of them looked nervous. Harry wondered if he and Professor Snape were on good enough terms this year for him to risk suggesting that Snape test his poison on someone else—Finnigan, perhaps, or maybe even Blaise—

And then a knock on the dungeon door burst in on Harry’s thoughts.

It was Colin Creevey, a Gryffindor boy in the year below Harry. He edged into the room, peering skittishly at Harry, and walked up to Snape’s desk at the front of the room.

“Yes?” said Snape curtly.

“Please, sir, I’m supposed to take Harry Potter upstairs.”

Snape stared down his hooked nose at Creevey, whose anxious smile faded from his face.

“Potter has another hour of Potions to complete,” said Snape coldly. “He will come upstairs when this class is finished.”

Creevey turned pink.

“Sir—sir, Mr. Bagman wants him,” he said nervously. “All the champions have got to go, I think they want to take photographs….”

Harry would have given anything he owned to have stopped Creevey saying those last few words. He chanced half a glance at Draco, but Draco was fastidiously rearranging his potioneering supplies and didn’t seem to be paying attention to anything else.

“Very well, very well,” Snape snapped. “Potter, leave your things here, I want you back down here later to take a look at your antidote.”

“Please, sir—he’s got to take his things with him,” squeaked Creevey. “All the champions—”

“Very _well!”_ said Snape. “Potter—take your bag and be off with you, then!”

Harry swung his back over his shoulder, got up, and headed for the door. As he walked through the Gryffindor desks, soft hissing sounds followed him, too quiet for Snape to hear.

“It’s, um, it’s pretty amazing, isn’t it, Potter?” said Creevey, after they had walked a few feet through the dungeons in silence. “Isn’t it, though? You being champion?”

The Muggle-born boy had idolized Harry when he had first arrived at Hogwarts, and while he had spent most of his first year at the school terrified that Harry was going to feed him to a monster, he had bounced back remarkably quickly once it had been proved that Harry wasn’t the Heir of Slytherin. Harry knew that the photograph he had signed for Creevey at the end of that year was one of the small boy’s prized possessions, and he wondered if that fact had had any bearing on why he had been the one sent to fetch Harry now—but surely no one else knew about that? Unless Creevey had been boasting about it since Harry’s name had come out of the goblet, but it wasn’t like any of his fellow Gryffindors would be impressed...

Maybe he had just been passing by when Bagman arrived, and had made a convenient messenger. Harry hoped that was all it was; the last thing he needed was for the rest of the school to find out he had once signed a photo for Creevey, now. He wasn’t Krum or Cedric; nobody _else_ would be asking him to sign anything, Harry knew that—but if the Gryffindors thought he was keen to start, they’d never let him hear the end of it.

“Yeah, really amazing,” said Harry heavily as they climbed the steps into the entrance hall. “What do they want photos for, Creevey?”

“The _Daily Prophet_ , I think!”

“Great,” said Harry dully. “Exactly what I need. More publicity.” He felt a pang when he thought about how excited Draco would have been to be in his shoes, or even to be there alongside Harry, and sighed. He wondered what he would do to cheer Draco up when the paper arrived with photographs of Harry inside.

“Good luck!” said Creevey when they had reached the right room. Harry knocked on the door and ent **e** red.

It turned out that photographs for the newspaper was only part of the ordeal ahead, and the entire wand weighing ceremony was miserable. Harry couldn’t even enjoy seeing Mr. Ollivander, who had sold Harry his wand, again; he spent the whole time the wand-maker was examining his wand worrying that Mr. Ollivander was going to say something about his wand’s connection to Voldemort—something that, as far as Harry was concerned, it couldn’t help, rather as he couldn’t help being related to Aunt Petunia—and that Rita Skeeter would overhear. Harry didn’t know exactly what to make of the magenta-robed reporter and her Quick-Quotes Quill, but he knew that whatever it was, it wasn’t good.

He missed having Draco at his side. His friend would have known exactly how to handle Skeeter, Harry was sure, and wouldn’t have gotten tongue-tied in the middle of a broom closet.

By the time they finally finished with all the photographs that Rita Skeeter wanted, dinner had already started. Harry hurried to join his friends, trying to think of some way to describe how much he had hated the whole thing in a way that would make Draco laugh rather than sulk, but he forgot all about Rita Skeeter and the wand weighing when he saw that Bowman was perched on the table in front of his friends, letting the three of them take turns to feed him bits of shepherd’s pie and braised pork.

Draco had already removed the letter that Bowman had brought, but he hadn’t unrolled it yet (or if he had, he had done a remarkably good job of rolling in back up again, right down to the indents left behind by the string that had tied it to the owl’s leg), and he handed it over to Harry with just one word: “Well?”

Harry unrolled the letter and read it fast.

> _Harry—_
> 
> _I can’t say everything I would like to in a letter, it’s too risky in case the owl is intercepted—we need to talk face-to-face. Can you ensure that you are alone by the fire in the Slytherin Dungeon at one o’clock in the morning on the 22 nd of November?_
> 
> _I know better than anyone that you can look after yourself, and while you’re around Dumbledore and Moody I don’t think anyone will be able to hurt you. However, someone seems to be having a good try. Entering you in that tournament would have been very risky, especially right under Dumbledore’s nose._
> 
> _Be on the watch, Harry. I still want to hear about anything unusual. Let me know about the 22 nd of November as quickly as you can._
> 
> _Remember—you need to be completely alone!_
> 
> _Sirius_

Harry looked up. “What?” he asked his friends. “What good will my being alone in the common room do?”

Draco read through the letter twice, then shook his head. “I have no idea,” he said.


	16. The Hungarian Horntail

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This section contains excerpts from Chapter Nineteen, beginning on page 313 and stretching until page 336 of the American hardcover. It skips over a large chunk in the middle of the chapter, starting on page 323 and picking up with the action again on page 330. Again, if you wish to refresh your memory of the exact events that were skipped, simply consult the original text; there seemed to be no point in repeating such a lengthy unaltered section.

The prospect of talking face-to-face with Sirius was all that sustained Harry over the next fortnight, the only bright spot on a horizon that had never looked darker. The shock of finding himself school champion had worn off slightly now, and the fear of what was facing him had started to sink in. The first task was drawing steadily nearer; he felt as though it were crouching ahead of him like some horrific monster, barring his path. He had never suffered nerves like these; they were beyond anything he had experienced before a Quidditch match, not even his last one against Hufflepuff, which had decided whether Slytherin would have a chance at the Quidditch Cup, and whether or not Harry would remain on the team. Harry was finding it hard to think about the future at all; he felt as though his whole life had been leading up to, and would finish with, the first task….

Admittedly, he didn’t see how Sirius was going to make him feel any better about having to perform an unknown piece of difficult and dangerous magic in front of hundreds of people, but Sirius had broken out of Azkaban Prison, which everyone agreed should have been impossible. Maybe he would be able to offer a few tips. Harry wrote back to Sirius saying that he would be beside the common room fire at the time Sirius had suggested, and he and Draco spent a few minutes discussing how they would make sure that there wouldn’t be any stragglers left in their way.

“Well if for some reason we can’t just have Crabbe and Goyle beat them silly,” Draco suggested with a sly smirk, “we can always use Moody’s Imperius Curse and _make_ them leave.”

“That isn’t funny,” Harry retorted immediately, but the idea did have a certain appeal.

In the meantime, life became even worse for Harry within the confines of the castle, for Rita Skeeter had published her piece about the Triwizard Tournament, and it had turned out to be not so much a report on the tournament as a highly colored life story of Harry. Much of the front page had been given over to a picture of Harry; the article (continuing on pages two, six, and seven) had been all about Harry; the names of the Beauxbatons and Durmstrang champions (misspelled) had been squashed into the last line of the article and Cedric hadn’t been mentioned at all.

The article had appeared ten days ago, and Harry still got a sick, burning feeling of shame in his stomach every time he thought about it. Rita Skeeter had reported him saying an awful lot of things that he couldn’t remember ever saying in his life, let alone in that broom cupboard.

I suppose I get my strength from my parents. I know they’d be very proud of me if they could see me now…. Yes, sometimes at night I still cry about them, I’m not ashamed to admit it…. I know nothing will hurt me during the tournament, because they’re watching over me….

But Rita Skeeter had gone even further than transforming his “er’s” into long, sickly sentences. She had interviewed other people about him too—and she hadn’t gone out of her way to find accurate sources.

Harry has at last found love at Hogwarts. His close friend, Colin Creevey, says that Harry is rarely seen out of the company of one Hermione Granger, a stunningly pretty Muggle-born girl who, like Harry, is one of the top students in the school.

“’Close friend’? We’ve barely spoken! She couldn’t have at least talked to someone in Slytherin?” Harry complained to Draco. “And I don’t even spend that much time with Hermione—not half as much as I spend with you, anyway!”

“True,” Draco smirked, “but I doubt Rita Skeeter wants to risk angering my parents by printing anything nasty about me. Maybe you should have pointed out we’re friends, when she was interviewing you. She might have been nicer.”

Harry rolled his eyes. “I told you, she didn’t bother waiting for me to say anything, just made it all up herself.”

“Then I guess it wouldn’t have mattered who she’d talked to about you, would it?”

Harry, not wanting to admit his friend had a point, just grumbled under his breath and braced himself for another long walk to class.

From the moment the article had appeared, Harry had had to endure people—Gryffindors, mainly—quoting it at him as he passed and making sneering comments.

“Want a hanky, Potter, in case you start crying in Transfiguration?”

“Since when have you been one of the top students in the school, Potter? Or is this a school you’ve set up with Crabbe and Goyle?”

“Hey—Harry!”

“Yeah, that’s right!” Harry found himself shouting as he wheeled around in the corridor, having had just about enough. “I’ve just been crying my eyes out over my dead mum, and I’m just off to do a bit more….”

“No—it was just—you dropped your quill.”

It was Cho. Harry felt the color rising in his face.

“Oh—right—sorry,” he muttered, taking the quill back.

“Er…good luck on Tuesday,” she said. “I really hope you do well.”

Which left Harry feeling extremely stupid.

The only good thing about the article was that Draco had read through it once and burst out into such raucous laughter that Harry had been afraid he was going to rupture something, so he didn’t have to worry about his friend getting miffed over the attention that Harry was getting and he wasn’t. In fact, a good portion of the resentment that Draco obviously felt over Harry being chosen as champion seemed to have evaporated over the last two weeks, although Harry wasn’t sure how much of that was due to the danger Harry was facing and how much was a result of the embarrassment of Rita Skeeter’s article.

“Oh Merlin, Harry,” Draco had said, wiping his streaming eyes with both hands, “this is possibly the worst interview I’ve ever read in my life. How could you have been so stupid to let her do that? No—don’t answer, I don’t want to know, I’m afraid I’ll lose what little respect I have left for you…”

Days later, he was still prone to quoting bits of the article to himself—or to Harry, or to Crabbe or Goyle—and breaking into laughter. Harry forced himself to smile, and told himself that Draco finding the article hilarious at least meant that there was one person at Hogwarts who didn’t believe what Rita Skeeter had written—well, really three, but Crabbe and Goyle didn’t count, because they always believed whatever Draco told them to believe.

Surprisingly, Pansy Parkinson made an effort of defending Harry too, although Harry would have rather she hadn’t. “Oh come on,” he heard her scolding two fifth year Slytherin girls one day at lunch, “don’t tell me you’re dim enough to believe a word of that tripe? Anyone who describes Hermione Granger as ‘stunningly pretty’ either needs their eyes examined, or to chug a whole pitcher of Veritaserum, so why on earth would you think any of the _rest_ of it’s accurate? But if you don’t believe me, go ask Crabbe over there if Harry keeps him up at night with all his crying, go on, I dare you….”

Harry managed a smile of gratitude for Pansy, who preened smugly before dropping back into her knot of gossip with Daphne Greengrass and Millicent Bulstrode, and Harry walked faster, hurrying out of the Great Hall before either of the fifth years could find the courage to interrupt Crabbe while he was eating.

 

It is a strange thing, but when you are dreading something, and would give anything to slow down time, it has a disobliging habit of speeding up. The days until the first task seemed to slip by as though someone had fixed the clocks to work at double speed. Harry’s feeling of barely controlled panic was with him wherever he went, as ever-present as the snide comments about the _Daily Prophet_ article.

On the Saturday before the first task, all students in the third year and above were permitted to visit the village of Hogsmeade. Harry was happy to get away from the castle for a bit, but he insisted on wearing his Invisibility Cloak.

“What on earth for?” Draco exclaimed. “You don’t have to sneak out anymore, you dummy, you’ve got permission to go now. And there aren’t any dementors now! What do you want to wear that for?”

“I don’t want to get pestered,” Harry said flatly.

Draco rolled his eyes, clearly thinking that Harry was behaving like an infant, but he didn’t care enough to keep arguing.

So Harry put on his Invisibility Cloak in the dormitory, went back upstairs, and together he and his friends set off for Hogsmeade.

Harry felt wonderfully free under the Cloak; he watched other students walking past them as they entered the village, most of them wearing some piece of yellow clothing (most of the school, other than the Slytherins, had taken to wearing yellow to show their support of Cedric, as though preparing for a Hufflepuff Quidditch match), but no horrible remarks came his way for a change, and nobody was quoting that stupid article, not even Draco.

“It’s a good thing Skeeter doesn’t know you own that,” Draco said to the empty air to Harry’s left. “Imagine what fun she’d have talking about you being too scared to go out in public.”

“She’d probably say I was ashamed to let people see my scar on account of it reminding me of how much I cry over my dead parents,” Harry said bitterly.

Draco laughed. “Ooh, probably!” he agreed.

“D’you wanna tell her?” Goyle asked. He pointed down the street. “’Cause you can, if you do.”

Rita Skeeter and her photographer friend had just emerged from the Three Broomsticks pub. Talking in low voices, they passed right by Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle without looking at them. Harry backed into the wall of Honeydukes to stop Rita Skeeter from hitting him with her crocodile-skin handbag. When they were gone, Harry said, “She’s staying in the village. I bet she’s coming to watch the first task.”

As he said it, his stomach flooded with a wave of molten panic. He didn’t mention this; while Draco enjoyed speculating about what might be coming in the first task, Harry didn’t like talking about it, and he had eventually squashed the discussion by saying that unless Draco got some evidence to talk about, there was no point in random guessing.

“You know what you need?” Draco said. “You need a press agent. Somebody who’s more publicity savvy than you to talk to reporters and keep you from bungling things. Not that that’s a low bar to clear.” He chuckled.

“You want the job?” Harry said shortly. “You’ve got it.”

“You won’t regret it,” Draco assured him, laughing.

“I know I won’t,” said Harry bitterly. “I don’t see how you could make it worse even if you tried.”

“I wanna Butterbeer,” Crabbe interrupted, staring hungrily at the Three Broomsticks. “Can we?”

“Oh, fine,” said Harry, who hoped the warm drink might relieve some of the butterflies in his stomach.

The Three Broomsticks was packed, mainly with Hogwarts students enjoying their free afternoon, but also with a variety of magical people Harry rarely saw anywhere else. Harry supposed that as Hogsmeade was the only all-wizard village in Britain, it was a bit of a haven for creatures like hags, who were not as adept as wizards at disguising themselves.

It was very hard to move through crowds in the Invisibility Cloak, in case you accidentally trod on someone, which tended to lead to awkward questions. Fortunately, Crabbe and Goyle were very good at clearing paths, so Draco told Goyle to lead Harry to a spare table in the corner while he and Crabbe went to buy drinks. On his way through the pub, Harry spotted Fred and George Weasley. Resisting the urge to give the twins a poke and scare the daylights out of them, he and Goyle reached the table and sat down at it.

Draco and Crabbe joined them a moment later and Draco slipped Harry a butterbeer under his Cloak.

Crabbe drained half of his in one gulp and sat back, looking very satisfied with life. “That’s better,” he announced, and belched.

“You’re a paragon of delicacy,” Draco sneered.

Crabbe beamed. “Thanks,” he said.

Draco rolled his eyes and Harry barely managed not to snort butterbeer up his nose as he laughed.

“What’s a pargon?” Goyle asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Draco drily, “it’s something above your pay grade.”

“Okay,” said Goyle, and lapsed into happy silence. After a few minutes, Crabbe got up to get himself a second butterbeer, while Harry watched the people in the pub. All of them looked cheerful and relaxed. Ernie Macmillan and Hannah Abbott were swapping Chocolate Frog cards at a nearby table, both of them clad nearly entirely in yellow. Right over by the door he saw Cho and a large group of her Ravenclaw friends. She wasn’t wearing anything yellow he could see, though…. This cheered up Harry very slightly….

What wouldn’t he have given to be one of those people, sitting around laughing and talking, with nothing to worry about but homework? He imagined how it would have felt to be here if his name _hadn’t_ come out of the Goblet of Fire. He wouldn’t be wearing the Invisibility Cloak, for one thing. He wouldn’t be worried about Draco sulking over too many people paying him attention. The four of them would probably be happily imagining what deadly dangerous task the school champions would be facing on Tuesday. He’d have been really looking forward to it, watching them do whatever it was…cheering on Cedric with everyone else, safe in a seat at the back of the stands….

He wondered how the other champions were feeling. Every time he had seen Cedric lately, he had been surrounded by admirers and looking nervous but excited. Harry glimpsed Fleur Delacour from time to time in the corridors; she looked exactly as she always did, haughty and unruffled. And Krum just sat in the library, pouring over books.

Harry thought of Sirius, and the tight, tense knot in his chest seemed to ease slightly. He would be speaking to him in just over twelve hours, for tonight was the night they were meeting at the common room fire—assuming nothing went wrong, as everything else had done lately….

“Oh hell, it’s Hagrid,” Draco whined. “Shouldn’t he be in some dive like the Hog’s Head? Or better yet, off feeding his fingers to the skrewts?”

The back of Hagrid’s enormous shaggy head—he had mercifully abandoned his bunches—emerged over the crowd. Harry wondered why he hadn’t spotted him at once, as Hagrid was so large, but standing up carefully, he saw that Hagrid had been leaning low, talking to Professor Moody. Hagrid had his usual enormous tankard in front of him, but Moody was drinking from his hip flask. Madam Rosmerta, the pretty landlady, didn’t seem to think much of this; she was looking askance at Moody as she collected glasses from tables around them. Perhaps she thought it was an insult to her mulled mead, but Harry knew better. Moody had told them all during their last Defense Against the Dark Arts lesson that he preferred to prepare his own food and drink at all times, as it was so easy for Dark wizards to poison an unattended cup.

As Harry watched, he saw Hagrid and Moody get up to leave. He waved, then remembered that Hagrid couldn’t see him. Moody, however, paused, his magical eye on the corner where Harry was sitting. He tapped Hagrid in the small of the back (being unable to reach his shoulder), muttered something to him, and then the pair of them made their way back across the pub toward Harry, Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle’s table.

“Wait, why are they coming this way?” Draco asked in a panicky voice. He looked around, but he was boxed in between Crabbe and Goyle—and Harry in between; although he couldn’t see Harry through the Cloak, he knew roughly where he was, as he had handed him his butterbeer a few minutes ago—and he couldn’t get out fast enough to avoid the two teachers.

“All right, boys?” said Hagrid loudly.

Draco stared at him in horrified disgust and said nothing, but his eyes kept darting nervously to Moody. Goyle smiled back guilelessly and said, “Hello!” but Crabbe didn’t look up from his butterbeer save to grunt briefly.

Moody cracked his scarred face in a smile and stared at the three visible boys with his normal eye; the other was whirring around, looking through the back of Moody’s head at the door and the bustling pub behind him. “I think we got off on the wrong foot,” Moody growled. “Bit of a misunderstanding about school policy. Better for all of us if we put it in the past, what do you say?”

He extended his gnarled hand to Draco, who looked at it like he might a venomous spider.

Harry elbowed him in the side and hissed, “Go on!”

Reluctantly, glaring at the empty space next to him where he assumed Harry was sitting, Draco reached out and gave Moody’s hand a quick shake with his fingertips. “Sure,” he said through gritted teeth, “great idea.”

He gave Harry another dark glare and leaned back in his seat as far as he could go, moving away from his two least favorite teachers. Crabbe drained his second butterbeer and looked around to see if anyone else was having trouble finishing theirs.

Moody limped around the table and bent down; Harry thought he was trying to read the label on Crabbe’s discarded bottles, until he muttered, “Nice Cloak, Potter.”

Harry stared at him in amazement. The large chunk missing from Moody’s nose was particularly obvious at a few inches’ distance. Moody grinned.

“Can your eye—I mean, can you—?”

“Yeah, it can see through Invisibility Cloaks,” Moody said quietly. “And it’s come in useful at times, I can tell you.”

Hagrid was beaming down at Harry too. Harry knew Hagrid couldn’t see him, but Moody had obviously told Hagrid he was there. Hagrid now bent down on the pretext of reading the empty bottles as well, and said in a whisper so low that only Harry could hear it, “Harry, meet me tonight at midnight at me cabin. Wear that Cloak.”

Straightening up, Hagrid said loudly, “Nice ter see yeh, lads,” winked, and departed. Moody followed him.

“Why does Hagrid want me to meet him at midnight?” Harry said, very surprised.

“He does?” said Draco, scowling at the swinging door. “Sorry, I wasn’t listening. I was too busy _shaking hands_ with a man who wants to _murder me.”_

Safe under the Cloak, Harry rolled his eyes. “He doesn’t want to murder you,” he said, “stop being melodramatic. At most he wants to torture you for a little, but not murder.”

“That makes me feel so much better,” Draco drawled.

“Aren’t you meeting Sirius Black tonight?” Goyle asked loudly, and cringed when the others hushed him. “Sorry,” Goyle whispered, aiming an apologetic pat in Harry’s general direction and instead hitting the edge of the table hard enough to rattle the butterbeer bottles.

“Goyle’s got a point, strange though that is,” Draco said. “If you meet that oaf at midnight, you won’t have a lot of time to get back before you need to meet Sirius. Better skip it.”

It was true that going down to Hagrid’s at midnight would mean cutting his meeting with Sirius very fine indeed; Draco repeatedly encouraged him to blow it off— “What could he possibly want with you that’s important enough to risk missing Sirius? He probably just wants to show you some new trick of the skrewts, like swallowing people whole!” —Harry, however, thought it better just to be quick at whatever Hagrid wanted him for. He was very curious to know what this might be; Hagrid had never asked Harry to visit him so late at night.

“Suit yourself,” Draco said, and shrugged. “Tell you what, I’ll wait in the common room, and if Sirius comes and you aren’t back, I can explain to him what was so important that you missed his mysterious and miraculous manifestation.”

Draco was annoyed that Sirius had not specified _how_ he was going to arrange for a face-to-face meeting with Harry, and as the hour of his arrival drew closer, he was starting to sulk. “Maybe he’s going to Transfigure himself into a fish and swim down,” he guessed. “Whatever you do, though, don’t open the window and let him in—you’ll flood the whole common room!” —and— “Does he even know where our common room is? He was a Gryffindor, wasn’t he? Oh, this is going to end well….”

At half past eleven that evening, Harry, who had pretended to go up to bed early, pulled the Invisibility Cloak back over himself and crept back downstairs through the common room. Quite a few people were still in there. Astoria and her friends had got hold of several dozen copies of Harry’s horrible _Daily Prophet_ article and were now bent over a pile with a large selection of paste and scissors. Harry tried to pretend he couldn’t see them; he didn’t want to know what they were doing, and was desperately afraid that he was going to find out tomorrow, like it or not. Harry crept past them to the hidden archway and waited for a minute or so, keeping an eye on his watch. Then Draco opened the secret door for him from the outside as they had planned. Harry slipped past him with a whispered “Thanks!” and set off through the castle.

The grounds were very dark. Harry walked down the lawn toward the lights shining in Hagrid’s cabin. What he found there—a Hagrid dressed for romance, a Hagrid eager and nervous to show-off to the Beauxbatons headmistress—would have left Harry reeling for several hours, were it not for the even more overwhelming sight of the four dragons that followed. Harry was so consumed with thoughts of the dragons that he couldn’t even summon enough energy to be upset at Charlie Weasley’s mocking reenactment of his mother weeping over the _Daily Prophet_ article.

He tried to console himself with the thought that they wouldn’t have to actually fight the dragons, just get past them, but that seemed more than hard enough on its own. He wondered what Fleur Delacour and Viktor Krum would make of the news, when their teachers told them what the first task was going to entail. By the looks of it, the only champion who would be facing the unknown on Tuesday was Cedric.

Harry reached the castle, slipped in through the front doors, and began to climb down the dungeon stairs, taking most of them two at a time; he was very out of breath, but he didn’t dare slow down…. He had less than five minutes to get down to the fire….

“Champions,” he gasped, in too much of a hurry to grimace as he usually did over the new password, and waited impatiently for the stones to grind aside and let him in. The common room was deserted except for Draco, who looked up anxiously at the sound.

Harry pulled off the Invisibility Cloak and threw himself into a high-backed chair in front of the fire. The room was in semidarkness; the flames were the only source of light. Draco’s pale face stood out sharply amid the shadows.

“Well?” Harry asked.

“No trouble,” Draco said. “What did Hagrid—?”

“Later,” said Harry.

Draco stood up, looking uncertain. “Are you sure you don’t want me to stay?” he asked.

Harry shook his head. “Sirius said alone. I don’t want to risk screwing up whatever he has planned, in case it won’t work with two people here.”

“All right,” said Draco reluctantly. “Well…if you’re _sure_ ….”

“Yeah,” Harry said, “thanks for clearing the room.”

Draco nodded. “Right,” he said. “Well…I’ll just…head down to bed, then…. You’ll tell me—?”

“As soon as we’re done,” Harry promised, and Draco slunk out of the room with many a backwards glance.

Harry scrubbed his face. He looked back into the flames, and jumped.

Sirius’s head was sitting in the fire. It took him a moment to figure out what was going on—like Dumbledore had last year, when summoning Cornelius Fudge and Kingsley Shacklebolt after Sirius’s escape, he must be using Floo Powder to talk through the fire—and even then, the sight nearly scared him out of his wits.

Harry scrambled out of his chair, crouched down by the hearth, and said, “Sirius—how’re you doing?”

Sirius looked different from Harry’s memory of him. When they had said good-bye, Sirius’s face had been gaunt and sunken, surrounded by a quantity of long, black, matted hair—but the hair was short and clean now, Sirius’s face was fuller, and he looked much younger, much more like the only photograph Harry had of him, which had been taken at the Potters’ wedding.

“Never mind me, how are you?” said Sirius seriously.

“I’m—” For a second, Harry tried to say “fine” —but he couldn’t do it. Before he could stop himself, he was talking more than he’d talked in days—about how no one believed he hadn’t entered the tournament of his own free will, how Rita Skeeter had lied about him in the _Daily Prophet_ , how he couldn’t walk down a corridor without being sneered at, how he was worried that his best friend was one round of applause too many away from chucking him, how he had shouted at Cho, who probably hated him now…

“…and now Hagrid’s just shown me what’s coming in the first task, and it’s dragons, Sirius, and I’m a goner,” he finished desperately.

Sirius looked at him, eyes full of concern, eyes that had not yet lost the look that Azkaban had given them—that deadened, haunted look. He had let Harry talk himself into silence without interruption, but now he said, “Dragons we can deal with, Harry, but we’ll get to that in a minute—I haven’t got long here…I’ve broken into a Wizarding house to use the fire, but they could be back at any time. There are things I need to warn you about.”

“What?” said Harry, feeling his spirits slip a further few notches…. Surely there could be nothing worse than dragons coming?

“Karkaroff,” said Sirius. “Harry, he was a Death Eater. The people who worked for Voldemort, you remember?”

“Yes—he—what?”

“He was caught, he was in Azkaban with me, but he got released. I’d bet everything that’s why Dumbledore wanted an Auror at Hogwarts this year—to keep an eye on him. Moody caught Karkaroff. Put him into Azkaban in the first place.”

“Karkaroff got released?” Harry said slowly—his brain seemed to be struggling to absorb yet another piece of shocking information. “Why did they release him?”

“You know there were some of Voldemort’s supporters who weaseled their way out of punishment, right?” Sirius’s eyes narrowed. “Some never went to Azkaban at all; got off during their trials, or bought their way out. Karkaroff wasn’t that slick, but he still did a deal with the Ministry of Magic,” he said bitterly. “He said he’d seen the error of his ways, and then he named names…he put a load of other people into Azkaban in his place…. That’s how lots of them did it, they got out of trouble: by turning on each other…. He’s not very popular in Azkaban because of it, I can tell you. And since he got out, from what I can tell, he’s been teaching the Dark Arts to every student who passes through that school of his. So watch out for the Durmstrang champion as well.”

“Draco said the same thing,” said Harry. “Well—not about watching out for Krum, but he thought Karkaroff was maybe the one who’d put my name in. But I don’t know. He’d have to be a really good actor, if so. He seemed furious about it. He wanted to stop me from competing.”

“We know he’s a good actor,” said Sirius, “because he convinced the Ministry of Magic to set him free, didn’t he? Now, I’ve been keeping an eye on the _Daily Prophet_ , Harry—”

“—you and the rest of the world,” said Harry bitterly.

“—and reading between the lines of that Skeeter woman’s article last month, Moody was attacked the night before he started at Hogwarts. Yes, I know she says it was another false alarm,” Sirius said hastily, seeing Harry about to speak, “but I don’t think so, somehow. I think someone tried to stop him from getting to Hogwarts. I think someone knew their job would be a lot more difficult with him around. And no one’s going to look into it too closely; Mad-Eye’s heard intruders a bit too often. But that doesn’t mean he can’t still spot the real thing. Moody was the best Auror the Ministry ever had.”

“So…what are you saying?” said Harry slowly. “Karkaroff’s trying to kill me? But—why?”

Sirius hesitated.

“I’ve been hearing some very strange things,” he said slowly. “The Death Eaters seem to be a bit more active than usual lately. They showed themselves at the Quidditch World Cup, didn’t they? Someone set off the Dark Mark…and then—did you hear about that Ministry of Magic witch who’s gone missing?”

“No,” said Harry, “what?”

“Bertha Jorkins…she disappeared in Albania, and that’s definitely where Voldemort was rumored to be last…and she would have known the Triwizard Tournament was coming up, wouldn’t she?”

“Yeah, but…it’s not very likely some Ministry witch would have walked straight into You-Know-Who, is it?” said Harry.

“Listen, I knew Bertha Jorkins,” said Sirius grimly. “She was at Hogwarts when I was, a few years above your dad and me. And she was an idiot. Very nosy, but no brains, none at all. It’s not a good combination, Harry. I’d say she’d be very easy to lure into a trap.”

“So…so Voldemort could have found out about the tournament?” said Harry. “Is that what you mean? You think Karkaroff might be here on his orders?”

“I don’t know,” said Sirius slowly, “I just don’t know…it could be someone else. You said Draco talked you into trying to put your name in the goblet?”

“Yeah,” Harry said, and laughed, “but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t trying to get either one of us killed.”

Sirius shook his head. “I’m not saying he was, not on purpose—but where did he get the idea to put your names in, eh? Could someone else have suggested it to him, in an attempt to get to you?”

Harry shook his head slowly. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Draco just thought it would be cool to be Hogwarts champion.” He laughed again, bitterly this time. “He still doesn’t know how wrong he was.”

Sirius’s face was full of sympathy in between the flames. “If it helps any, I think he’d come to his senses very quickly, if your positions were reversed.”

“I wish they were,” Harry said. “No—I don’t. I just wish everything didn’t always happen to _me_.” He mustered a smile. “Do you know, back when everybody thought I was the Heir of Slytherin, I think Draco would have given anything to be in my shoes…but he’s got no idea what it’s really like. None at all.”

They were silent for a long moment. Then Sirius said, “Well, it’s possible someone could be taking advantage of that. Not that I think Draco would do anything to hurt you on purpose,” he added quickly, seeing Harry start to bristle, “but if the wrong person whispered the wrong thing in his ear….”

But Harry was shaking his head. “If somebody had tried to get me to put my name in the goblet by talking Draco into trying it for both of us, I’ll bet they would have come up with a better idea for how to do it than just asking an older student to put it in for us. That didn’t come _close_ to working.”

“All right, fair enough,” Sirius agreed, “but you still need to be careful, Harry. People will try to get to you through your friends which means—even if they don’t _mean_ to betray you—you could be in danger from those closest to you. You need to be on your guard always, even around the people you think you can trust.”

Harry shivered. “You sound like Moody,” he grumbled.

“Moody’s not wrong,” Sirius said shortly.

“Well so far he’s the only one who’s been attacking anybody,” Harry retorted.

Sirius’s eyebrows went up and his face spread into a grin. “What, did someone creep up behind him and shout ‘boo’? Because I think you’d have to agree that they got whatever was coming to them….”

“No,” Harry shook his head, “I mean—well, he showed us the Unforgivable Curses in class, and then he actually put the Imperius Curse on us, to teach us how to fight it.”

Sirius whistled. “That’s some advanced magic,” he said. “Well, I was right; I’m not the only one reading the signs, not if Moody’s getting you lot ready for war.”

Harry was starting to get annoyed at how impressed Sirius seemed to be with Moody. “And what would you call turning someone into a ferret and bouncing them all around the entrance hall for no good reason, huh?” he asked.

“Moody did that?” Sirius said.

Harry nodded. “His first day here, to Draco. I’m pretty sure the only reason he hasn’t done it a dozen times since is because McGonagall told him he wasn’t allowed.”

Sirius burst out laughing. He stopped when he saw the scowl on Harry’s face. “I’m sorry, Harry,” he said. “It isn’t funny, really, and it certainly wasn’t a nice thing to do—but I’ve seen Moody in action, remember, so I can’t help but picture him doing that to some of the people I know who’ve crossed him in the past, is all.”

“It’s fine,” Harry said shortly. “Just don’t bring it up in front of Draco, okay? He was really upset.”

“Of course,” said Sirius soothingly, “anyone would be. Still, at least you’ve got Moody on your side rather than against you, eh? If that’s what he does to students who get out of line, imagine what he’ll do to people he really dislikes!”

When Harry’s frown didn’t lighten, Sirius cleared his throat. “Right,” he said, “anyway—that brings us right back where we were. Whoever put your name in that goblet did it for a reason, and I can’t help thinking the tournament would be a very good way to attack you and make it look like an accident.”

“Looks like a really good plan from where I’m standing,” said Harry, grinning bleakly. “They’ll just have to stand back and let the dragons do their stuff.”

“Right—these dragons,” said Sirius, speaking very quickly now. “There’s a way, Harry. Don’t be tempted to try a Stunning Spell—dragons are strong and too powerful magically to be knocked out by a single Stunner, you need about half a dozen wizards at a time to overcome a dragon—”

“Yeah, I know, I just saw,” said Harry.

“But you can do it alone,” said Sirius. “There is a way, and a simple spell’s all you need. Just focus on the weak spots—and they do have some, although not many, it’s true. But the key here is that you don’t need to _beat_ the dragon, just get _past_ it. That’s easier.”

Harry frowned. “Isn’t it the same thing in the end?” he asked.

Sirius shook his head, dislodging several embers. “Thankfully, no,” he said. “Because I don’t know any wizard who could take on a dragon single-handedly in a fight and be sure of winning—maybe Dumbledore.”

“Then what am I supposed to do?” Harry asked.

“Take advantage of those weak spots. It can’t catch what it can’t see, and dragons don’t have very good eyesight to begin with. They’re farsighted, all of them—well, they’d have to be, with necks that long, right?”

Harry had to admit that that made sense,  but suddenly Sirius turned, as though looking over a shoulder that Harry couldn’t see.

“Do you hear that?” he whispered.

Harry strained his ears. “I don’t hear anything,” he said.

Sirius looked back at Harry, his eyes wide. “I have to leave,” he whispered. “Sorry!”

“Go!” Harry agreed. “Hurry!”

There was a tiny _pop!_ as Sirius’s head withdrew from the flames. Harry sat for a long time watching the fire, his stomach in knots.

Though he sat there for over an hour, Sirius did not return.


	17. The First Task

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This section contains a number of excerpts from Chapter Twenty, stretching from page 337 to page 362 of the American hardcover edition. Two large sections—the part in the champions’ tent, and Harry’s confrontation with the Horntail—have been largely glossed-over, as there was nothing in them that would have changed from canon. Please feel free to consult the source text if you want to add some more excitement to this installment; they really are lovely sections of story.

Harry got up on Sunday morning and dressed so inattentively that it was a while before he realized he was trying to pull his hat onto his foot instead of his sock. When he’d finally got all his clothes on the right parts of his body, he grabbed a handful of parchment, a quill, and a bottle of ink. He was stuffing it all into his pockets when Draco woke up, pulled his curtains open, and glared at Harry.

“Why didn’t you wake me up?” he asked. “You said you’d tell me everything—”

“Right away, yeah, sorry. Something happened.” Harry swallowed hard. He had barely been able to fall asleep last night, so worried had he been about Sirius, but he didn’t feel tired at all—more like he had just swallowed an entire carton of Fizzing Whizbees whole. “Get dressed and come with me, I’ll explain on the way.”

“On the way where?” Draco asked. “To breakfast?”

Harry shook his head. “The Owlery,” he said. “Hurry.”

Crabbe and Goyle flatly refused to skip breakfast, and Harry was in too much of a hurry to wait for Draco to coerce them, so the two of them mounted the stairs alone. As they walked—Harry sometimes breaking into a jog out of nerves—Harry told Draco how Sirius had appeared in the common room fireplace.

“The Floo Network!” Draco exclaimed. “Of course—because the spells that bar Hogwarts’ fireplaces from being accessed by the network are just barrier spells meant to keep anyone from getting _through_. If you stayed in your own fireplace, you could still use the connection to communicate without tripping the security wards, as long as—”

“Do you want to hear what Sirius said or not?” Harry demanded.

“Yes, sorry!”

Harry recounted everything that Sirius had said last night in the fire, ending with his unexpected exit. Draco seemed less concerned with the fact that Sirius had had to leave suddenly than he was with the fact that he had been interrupted before he could finish telling Harry what to do about the dragons.

“So it’s something to do with their bad eyesight,” he mused, his gray eyes narrowed in thought. “But it’s not like they’re blind—they’ll still be able to see well enough to gobble you up if you just stand there.”

“Thanks,” Harry muttered. “That’s really encouraging.”

Draco smirked. “My pleasure,” he said sweetly.

Harry shook his head.  “What about Sirius, though? I reckon the family whose fireplace he was using came home—or maybe the Ministry figured out where he was and tracked him down….”

Draco shrugged. “Well, if they’ve caught him, it’s bound to be in the _Daily Prophet_ this morning—or the evening edition at the latest. We’ll know soon enough.”

 “It’s all my fault,” Harry said. “If I hadn’t wasted so much time _whining_ ….”

They walked into the Owlery, which was deserted, most students being either still asleep or down at breakfast. There were more owls around than there had been the last time Harry had been up here, but the perches were still less crowded than usual; at least a few owls were off delivering morning letters, then.

Harry pulled the crumpled wad of parchment out of one pocket and the quill and ink bottle out of the other, and sat down to write a hurried letter.

Draco paced the room impatiently, speculating about Sirius’s aborted advice. “Do you think he was talking about your Invisibility Cloak?” Draco asked. “That would probably work—but only if you were willing to tell everyone you owned one.” He shook his head. “I’d put that down as an option of last resort, personally.”

“I don’t think they’ll let me use my cloak,” Harry said absently. “That would probably be cheating.”

“It’s only cheating if it doesn’t work,” Draco retorted. “If you hid it under your robes….”

Harry shook his head again. “They made a pretty big deal out of our wands being the only thing we’ll have with us,” he said, blowing impatiently on the ink to dry it.

“Fine,” said Draco, “so what do _you_ think he was going to say?”

“I don’t know, do I?” Harry said shortly. He chose a great horned owl who looked particularly fast and tied his scribbled letter onto its leg. “Please hurry,” he told the owl, who wasted no time hooting or preening, but flapped off through the window at once. Harry watched it for a long time, the sick feeling in his stomach intensifying.

Eventually Hedwig flapped over and settled herself on his shoulder. Harry absently scratched her chin and she ran her beak through his untidy hair a few times before she returned to her perch. Harry felt a little better after, but he still didn’t eat much breakfast.

When Theodore Nott’s copy of the _Daily Prophet_ arrived, Harry snatched it out of his fingers without asking and poured over the headlines.

“No, help yourself,” Theodore drawled. “Go right ahead, I insist.”

“What’s up, Potter,” Blaise Zabini asked him, “checking to see if they’ve printed another interview?”

Harry ignored both wizards, now turning back to the front page and checking through again more carefully, just in case he had missed something the first time. He figured that if Sirius had been captured it would have been headline news at least, and probably on the front page, but there was no mention of him at all—not even the periodic “pursuit updates” that the Auror Department released to the press every few weeks.

Harry sat back with a sigh of relief and returned the now-crumpled paper to Theodore, who rolled his eyes at him before burying himself in the back section.

“Told you he’d be fine,” Draco said dismissively. “Now—about this dragon….”

They spent the morning outside, speculating on possible solutions—or at least, Harry and Draco speculated; Crabbe and Goyle offered occasional suggestions that were quickly ignored (“You just gotta be really fast then, so the dragon can’t see you go past!” “Nobody can run that fast, you idiot!”) and complained that Draco had forbidden them from trying to sneak over and get a peek at the dragons.

“And how are you going to explain knowing they’re there, huh?” he asked. “I mean _without_ giving away that Harry told you about them.”

Crabbe spent the rest of the morning sulking and trying to skip stones across the lake. He might have been able to do better if the Giant Squid hadn’t decided that he wanted to play catch, and stolen every stone he threw. When the squid started throwing them back, the four of them retired to the library instead. Here, Harry pulled down every book he could find on dragons, and he and Draco set to work searching through the large pile while the other two watched, trying to pretend they weren’t bored.

The books weren’t exactly riveting—or helpful—but at least looking through them gave Harry something else to think of, besides Sirius.

 _“’Talon-clipping by charms…treating scale-rot…’_ This is no good, this is for nutters like Hagrid who want to keep them healthy….”

 _“’Dragons are extremely difficult to slay, owing to the ancient magic that imbues their thick hides, which none but the most powerful spells can penetrate…’_ But Sirius said a simple one would do it….”

“Let’s try some simple spellbooks, then,” said Harry, throwing aside _Men Who Love Dragons Too Much_.

He returned to the table with a pile of spellbooks, set them down, and began to flick through each in turn. When he saw Hermione Granger walk past with an equally large pile of books in her arms, Harry wasn’t surprised, but she was when she spotted the four Slytherins.

“What on earth are you doing here?” she asked, hurrying to their table.

“It’s a public space, Granger,” Draco sneered. “Everybody’s allowed to use the library.”

“Yes, of course, I know that, but—well, the first task is on Tuesday, isn’t it? Shouldn’t you be…I don’t know…preparing?”

“That’s what we’re trying to do,” Harry said dully.

Hermione dumped her books on a corner of the table at once and sat down. “Let me help,” she said.

Harry hesitated a moment, remembering how she felt about rule-breaking—then decided that compared to a dragon, a lecture from Hermione Granger was nothing to worry about. He pushed a stack of books toward her. “Knock yourself out,” he said, “we’re trying to find a simple spell that will let me defeat a dragon.”

“Defeat a _what?”_ Hermione said. She covered her mouth, looking horrified—whether at the thought of Harry having to face a dragon, or at the fact that she had just shrieked in the library, Harry wasn’t sure.

“A dragon,” Harry said, and gave her a brief summary of what he had learned last night.

Hermione was shocked by the news that Karkaroff had been a Death Eater, but she agreed with Draco that the dragons were the more pressing problem.

“But what kind of simple spell could possibly help you with a dragon?” she said.

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” said Harry, indicating the towering pile of books.

Draco, however, was looking at the books Hermione had brought. “What are all those for?” he said. “You’re not still on your stupid house-elf thing, are you?”

“As a matter of fact,” Hermione said haughtily, “I am.”

“It doesn’t look like it’s been much of a success so far,” Draco said nastily. “Or are everyone else’s badges invisible?” He looked pointedly at the S.P.E.W. badge that Hermione was wearing pinned to the front of her jumper; it was true, other than her and, on occasion, Ron Weasley, Harry hadn’t seen anyone else wearing one.

“Actually several people have joined,” Hermione replied calmly. “Perhaps they simply don’t feel comfortable advertising their involvement, knowing that there are small-minded people like you out there who will give them grief for their efforts at bettering the lives of less fortunate creatures.”

Draco snorted. “Oh, loads and loads of folks, I’m sure,” he sneered. Harry, who had in fact paid Hermione her two sickles a few weeks ago and taken a badge in order to stop her pestering him, looked away and said nothing.

Hermione raised her chin in the air. “It might interest you to know that my research indicates that the common house-elf, as we call them these days, has its origins in—”

“Hermione!” Harry interrupted her quickly. “We don’t have time for house-elves right now. I have to face a dragon on Tuesday, remember?”

“Oh, sorry Harry,” said Hermione, looking guilty. “I didn’t forget, I just…got distracted. It won’t happen again.”

And indeed, Hermione bent herself to the effort of finding a solution to Harry’s dilemma with such enthusiasm that she was soon speculating aloud as she read:

“Well, there are Switching Spells…but what’s the point of Switching it? Unless you swapped its fangs for wine-gums or something that would make it less dangerous…. But Sirius said the eyes were the key. Are you supposed to switch _those_ for something else? The trouble is, like that book said, not much is going to get through a dragon’s hide…. I’d say Transfigure it, but something that big, you really haven’t got a hope, I doubt even Professor McGonagall…unless you’re supposed to put the spell on _yourself?_ Maybe to give yourself extra powers? But _they’re_ not simple spells, I mean, we haven’t done any of those in class, I only know about them because I’ve been doing O.W.L. practice papers…. I suppose a Disillusionment Charm would help, but those’re practically N.E.W.T.-level….”

“Hermione,” Harry said, glancing at Draco, who had gone pink when she mentioned Transfiguring the dragon, “will you shut up for a bit, please? We’re trying to concentrate.”

But all that happened, when Hermione fell silent, was that Harry’s brain filled with a sort of blank buzzing, which didn’t seem to allow room for concentration. He stared hopelessly down the index of _Basic Hexes for the Busy and Vexed. Instant scalping…_ but dragons had no hair… _pepper breath_ …that would probably increase a dragon’s firepower… _horn tongue_ …just what he needed, to give it an extra weapon…

“Oh no, he’s back _again_ , why can’t he read on his stupid ship?” said Hermione irritably as Viktor Krum slouched in, cast a surly look over at the five of them, and settled himself in a distant corner with a pile of books.

Draco perked-up instantly, giving Krum a bright grin that the other boy was too busy reading to notice. “What have you got against Quidditch players, huh?” he asked Hermione out of the corner of his mouth.

“It’s not _him_ that’s the problem,” Hermione said darkly. “Just wait, his fan club will be here in a moment twittering away….”

And sure enough, less than five minutes later, a gang of girls tiptoed past them, one of them wearing a Bulgaria scarf tied around her waist.

“What are they doing here?” Draco asked, sounding offended.

“Following Krum,” said Hermione. “He’s in here _all_ the time, probably reading-up for the tournament, which wouldn’t be so bad, because he never says or does anything noisy, but those idiots are always following him around, peeking at him around the bookshelves and giggling. It’s pathetic. He’s not even good-looking!” she muttered angrily, glaring at Krum’s sharp profile. “They only like him because he’s famous! They wouldn’t look twice at him if he couldn’t do that Wonky-Faint thing—”

“Wronski Feint,” Harry and Draco corrected her in horrified unison.

 “Honestly,” Draco continued, “in class you act like you swallow your textbooks, how is that you have such a hard time with basic Quidditch terms?”

“Maybe because unlike schoolwork, silly Quidditch terms don’t actually matter,” Hermione retorted. “I’ve got more important things to think about than—than how fast somebody can catch a Snitch, or how close they can get to plowing themselves into the ground before they fall off their broom, or—”

Draco slammed his hands on the table and shot to his feet. “That’s it!” he exclaimed, loud enough to jolt Goyle out of his nap, and to earn all five of them a glare from both Viktor Krum and Madam Pince, who poked her head around a nearby shelf and scowled until Harry dragged Draco back into his seat and shushed him.

“What’s it?” Harry hissed. “And be quiet—you’re going to get us kicked out!”

“It doesn’t matter,” Draco said, “I know what you need to do to get past the dragon!”

Harry gaped. “What?” he said. “How?”

“Yes, don’t keep us in suspense,” said Hermione sulkily.

“Fly, of course!” Draco beamed. “If you’re on your Firebolt, you’ll be too fast for the dragon to get a bead on; you can just go right past it!”

“Great,” said Harry, “only I won’t have my broomstick with me, will I? Just my wand, and I can’t exactly fly that—unless one of you knows how to Transfigure a wand into a broomstick?”

Hermione frowned. “I’m not sure there _is_ any way to Transfigure a wand—not your _own_ wand, certainly. How would you cast the spell on it, when you were using it to cast the spell?” Her brown eyes drifted out of focus as she thought. “That does raise an interesting philosophical question, I suppose, but it doesn’t do much to help with the immediate problem….”

“We’ll smuggle it down for you,” Draco offered, ignoring Hermione. “Everyone gets to come and watch the tournament, right? So Crabbe, Goyle, and I will all be in the audience—we’ll bring your broom with us.”

“And how do I get it from you?” Harry retorted. “And what excuse will you give for just _happening_ to have brought my Firebolt along?”

“We can say it wanted to see the show too,” Goyle suggested.

Harry rolled his eyes. “Nice try, Draco—but try again. Anyway, a broomstick isn’t a spell, so that can’t be what Sirius was talking about.”

Draco shook his head. “No, that’s got to be the solution,” he said mulishly. “We just need to figure out how to implement it….”

They spent the next several hours throwing possibilities back and forth and trying to ignore the giggles of Viktor Krum’s fan club, but by the time dinner rolled around, they had come up with nothing better than Draco’s suggestion of smuggling the broom under their robes and tossing it to Harry when the dragon showed up.

“There’s got to be a better way,” Hermione insisted.

“Well we’re all ears whenever you care to tell us what that is,” Draco snapped.

“Let’s take a break and get something to eat,” Harry suggested. “I bet we’re all hungry….”

“I sure am!” Crabbe said, perking up. Goyle nodded enthusiastically.

Harry was glad to leave the library; his head ached from all the thinking he had been doing, and he was eager to check the evening’s edition of the _Daily Prophet_. While a lot of his worry had dissipated at the lack of headlines that morning, he was still concerned that something might have happened. Harry knew he wouldn’t be able to fully relax until he got another letter from Sirius, telling him in his own words that he was all right, but not reading about his capture in the day’s paper would certainly help.

It was at dinner, when Theodore snatched his copy of the _Daily Prophet_ back from Harry with an indignant, “Do you _mind?_ Order your own, if you want to get your hands on one that badly! Merlin, it’s like being back in Charms class with Parkinson!” that inspiration finally struck.

“A Summoning Charm!” Harry said excitedly, letting go of the paper. “That’s how I can get my Firebolt—I’ll summon it! But—” His face fell. “Will it work from all the way in the castle?”

“Of course it will,” Draco assured him, “at least, if you can figure out how to do the charm at all….”

Harry grimaced; he still hadn’t mastered the Summoning Charm, and since he had had bigger things to worry about, he hadn’t really been trying to. Now he had to figure it out by tomorrow afternoon, or he was going to have _much_ bigger things to worry about.

 

Harry barely slept that night. When he awoke on Monday morning, he seriously considered for the first time ever just running away from Hogwarts. But as he looked around the Great Hall at breakfast time, and thought about what leaving the castle would mean, he knew he couldn’t do it. It was the only place he had ever been happy…well, he supposed he must have been happy with his parents too, but he couldn’t remember that.

Somehow, the knowledge that he would rather be here and facing a dragon than back on Privet Drive with Dudley was good to know; it made him feel slightly calmer. He finished his bacon with difficulty (his throat wasn’t working too well), and as he and Draco got up—Crabbe and Goyle lingering to stuff more food into their mouths until the last possible second, as usual—he saw Cedric Diggory leaving the Hufflepuff table.

Cedric still didn’t know about the dragons…the only champion who didn’t, if Harry was right in thinking that Maxime and Karkaroff would have told Fleur and Krum….

“I’ll see you back in the common room,” Harry said, coming to his decision as he watched Cedric leaving the Hall; they had decided to skip Divination to continue practicing the Summoning Charm instead. “Go on, I’ll catch you up.”

“What are you talking about?” said Draco. “Where are you going?”

“I’ll catch you up, okay?”

By the time Harry reached the bottom of the marble staircase, Cedric was at the top. He was with a load of sixth-year friends. Harry didn’t want to talk to Cedric in front of them; they were among those who had been quoting Rita Skeeter’s article at him every time he went near them. He followed Cedric at a distance and saw that he was heading toward the Charms corridor. This gave Harry an idea. Pausing at a distance from them, he pulled out his wand, and took careful aim.

_“Diffindo!”_

Cedric’s bag split. Parchment, quills, and books spilled out of it onto the floor. Several bottles of ink smashed.

“Don’t bother,” said Cedric in an exasperated voice as his friends bent down to help him. “Tell Flitwick I’m coming, go on….”

This was exactly what Harry had been hoping for. He slipped his wand back into his robes, waited until Cedric’s friends had disappeared into their classroom, and hurried up the corridor, which was no empty of everyone but himself and Cedric.

“Hi,” said Cedric, picking up a copy of _A Guide to Advanced Transfiguration_ that was now splattered with ink. “My bag just split…brand-new and all…”

“Cedric,” said Harry, “the first task is dragons.”

“What?” said Cedric, looking up.

“Dragons,” said Harry, speaking quickly, in case Professor Flitwick came out to see where Cedric had got to. “They’ve got four, one for each of us, and we’ve got to get past them.”

Cedric stared at him. Harry saw some of the panic he’d been feeling since Saturday night flickering in Cedric’s gray eyes.

“Are you sure?” Cedric said in a hushed voice.

“Dead sure,” said Harry. “I’ve seen them.”

“But how did you find out? We’re not supposed to know….”

“Never mind,” said Harry quickly—he knew Hagrid would be in trouble if he told the truth. “But I’m not the only one who knows. Fleur and Krum will know by now—Maxime and Karkaroff both saw the dragons too.”

Cedric straightened up, his arms full of inky quills, parchment, and books, his ripped bag dangling off one shoulder. He stared at Harry, and there was a puzzled, almost suspicious look in his eyes.

“Why are you telling me?” he asked.

Harry looked at him in disbelief. He was sure Cedric wouldn’t have asked that if he had seen the dragons himself. Harry wouldn’t have let his worst enemy face those monsters unprepared—well, perhaps the Weasley twins….

“It’s just…fair, isn’t it?” he said to Cedric. “We all know now…we’re on an even footing, aren’t we?”

Cedric was still looking at him in a slightly suspicious way when Harry heard a familiar clunking noise behind him. He turned around and saw Mad-Eye Moody emerging from a nearby classroom.

“Come with me, Potter,” he growled. “Diggory, off you go.”

Harry stared apprehensively at Moody. Had he overheard them?

“Er—Professor, I’m supposed to be in Divination—”

“Never mind that, Potter. In my office, please….”

Harry followed him, wondering what was going to happen to him now. What if Moody wanted to know how he’d found out about the dragons? Would Moody go to Dumbledore and tell on Hagrid, or just turn Harry into a ferret? Well, it might be easier to get past a dragon if he were a ferret, Harry thought dully, he’d be smaller, much less easy to see from a height of fifty feet…

He followed Moody into his office. Moody closed the door behind them and turned to look at Harry, his magical eye fixed upon him as well as the normal one.

“That was a very decent thing you just did, Potter,” Moody said quietly.

Harry didn’t know what to say; this wasn’t the reaction he had expected at all.

“Sit down,” said Moody, and Harry sat, looking around.

He had visited this office under three of its previous occupants. The first time had been an aborted punishment session with Professor Quirrell—really an attempt by Lord Voldemort to murder him, although Snape had interfered before Harry could get hurt—and he had been too focused on the clutter left behind by previous teachers to take in much of the décor. In Professor Lockhart’s day, the walls had been plastered with beaming, winking pictures of Professor Lockhart himself. When Lupin had lived here, you were more likely to come across a specimen of some fascinating new Dark creature he had procured for them to study in class. Now, however, the office was full of a number of exceptionally odd objects that Harry supposed Moody had used in the days when he had been an Auror.

On his desk stood what looked like a large, cracked, glass spinning top. In the corner on a small table stood an object that looked something like an extra-squiggly, golden television aerial. It was humming slightly. What appeared to be a mirror hung opposite Harry on the wall, but it was not reflecting the room. Shadowy figures were moving around inside it, none of them clearly in focus.

“Like my Dark Detectors, do you?” said Moody, who was watching Harry closely.

“What’s that?” Harry asked, pointing at the squiggly golden aerial.

“Secrecy sensor. Vibrates when it detects concealment and lies…no use here, of course, too much interference—students in every direction lying about why they haven’t done their homework. Been humming ever since I got here. I had to disable my Sneakoscope because it wouldn’t stop whistling.” He jerked a calloused thumb in the direction of the spinning top. “It’s extra-sensitive, picks up stuff about a mile around. Of course, it could be picking up more than kid stuff,” he added in a growl.

“And what’s the mirror for?”

“Oh that’s my Foe-Glass. See them out there, skulking around? I’m not really in trouble until I see the whites of their eyes. That’s when I open my trunk.”

He let out a short, harsh laugh, and pointed to the large trunk under the window. It had seven keyholes in a row. Harry wondered what was in there, until Moody’s next question brought him sharply back to earth.

“So…found out about the dragons, have you?”

Harry hesitated. He’d been afraid of this—but he hadn’t told Cedric, and he certainly wasn’t going to tell Moody, that Hagrid had broken the rules.

“It’s all right,” said Moody, sitting down and stretching out his wooden leg with a groan. “Cheating’s a traditional part of the Triwizard Tournament and always has been.”

“I didn’t cheat,” said Harry sharply. “It was—a sort of accident that I found out.”

Moody grinned. “I wasn’t accusing you, laddie. I’ve been telling Dumbledore from the start, he can be as high-minded as he likes, but you can bet old Karkaroff and Maxime won’t be. They’ll have told their champions everything they can. They want to win. They want to beat Dumbledore. They’d like to prove he’s only human.”

Moody gave another harsh laugh, and his magical eye swiveled around so fast it made Harry feel queasy to watch it.

“So…got any ideas how you’re going to get past your dragon yet?” said Moody.

“Maybe,” said Harry. “We’re working on it—er, my friends and I, I mean.”

Moody nodded. “Good things to have around, friends. Allies. People who will stick by you when the going gets roughest—not that many will, mind you; even the best of friends can balk when faced with real danger for the first time….”

“Well, I’m the only one that has to face the dragon,” Harry said shortly, “so I think I’ll be all right. They’re just helping me practice for it. Actually,” he added suddenly, meeting Moody’s eyes without flinching, “the plan was Draco’s idea.”

Moody nodded again. “He’s a clever one,” he said. “You’ll want to keep him close.”

Harry blinked; he had expected Moody to say something about inevitable betrayal and constant vigilance. “Er—right,” said Harry. “I will. Thanks. Um…we were actually, ah, going to try and practice some this morning, if that’s all right with you…?”

Moody shrugged. “It’s not my class you’re skipping,” he said bluntly.

Harry nodded and started for the door. He paused with his hand on the knob when Moody said, “Oh—and Potter? Good luck.” He smiled. “You’re going to need it.”

 

Harry raced downstairs, wishing he had the Marauder’s Map with him; the last person he wanted to run into when he was skiving class was Filch, patrolling the hallways with his evil-eyed cat, Mrs. Norris. He made it back to the dungeon without incident and found Draco waiting for him alone in the Slytherin common room.

“I sent Crabbe and Goyle on to class,” he explained. “Not that they’ll be any good for telling us what we miss, but they won’t be much help with this either, and that will keep them out of our way.”

Harry nodded. “Good idea,” he said distractedly, and led the way back into the hallways. Their practice in the common room last night had not gone well: too many other students getting in the way, and yelling at Harry for accidentally summoning their things instead of what he was aiming at. While the dungeon was much emptier now, both Harry and Draco had agreed that it still wasn’t an ideal locale for practice Summoning Charms.

They found an empty classroom—there were several unused rooms in the dungeons near the Potions Room, and being in Slytherin meant they didn’t have to worry about Snape taking points if he noticed them skiving—where they could practice uninterrupted.

Harry told Draco what Moody had said (leaving out the part where he had told Cedric about the dragons; he suspected that Draco would think that had been a mistake) including when Moody had called Draco clever, and a friend that Harry ought to stick close to.

“I was kind of surprised, actually,” Harry said lightly. “I mean, first I thought he was going to yell at me, then I thought he was going to spout his usual paranoia about betrayal, but instead he…sort of complimented you? It was weird.”

Draco frowned. “Hmm,” he said, and stacked the scattered books back onto the desks that Harry was trying to summon them from. “Well…maybe he’s feeling guilty?”

Harry nodded. “Yeah,” he agreed, “that’s probably it. I just didn’t know he was the sort who _felt_ guilt.”

Draco laughed bitterly. “I think it’s probably your doing,” he said.

“Me?” said Harry, surprised; his concentration slipped and _The Standard Book of Spells, Grade Four_ tumbled to the floor. Harry scowled at the treacherous book, then looked back up at Draco. “What do I have to do with it?”

“Well,” Draco explained slowly, “you’ve heard about how my family was, er, accused of being among the Dark Lord’s followers? Someone wanted to get one over on father, you know, make him look, er, bad I guess…. So they told the Ministry that he and mother had been, you know….” He flapped his hand, as though he could sum up an entire war with a dismissive gesture. “And of course, they were found innocent at the trial, but there were some people who didn’t believe the results.” He tossed his head arrogantly. “Envious, petty people mostly, who dislike father because of how successful he is. Anyway, I expect Moody was one of them, but then when he saw that _we_ were friends, well….” Draco shrugged.

“He figured that your dad couldn’t have been on the Dark Lord’s side, not if you were hanging out with The Boy Who Lived?” Harry finished wryly.

Draco nodded. A smile crept back onto his face. “Exactly,” he said.

“Well…you’re welcome, then.” Harry grinned.

Draco laughed and told Harry to try summoning something smaller—like the blackboard chalk.

They worked through Care of Magical Creatures, too—Draco was delighted for an excuse to skip his least favorite class, and Harry was sure that Hagrid wouldn’t mind, once he explained—and  didn’t bother to break for lunch. It was just as well that they hadn’t brought Crabbe and Goyle along: their complaints about missing a meal would have been unbearable. Instead, they practiced. Harry tried with all his might to make various objects fly across the room toward him. He was still having problems. The books and quills kept losing heart halfway across the room and dropping like stones to the floor.

“Come on, this isn’t that hard,” Draco scolded him. “Just focus, would you?”

“What d’you think I’m trying to do?” said Harry angrily. “A great big dragon keeps popping up in my head for some reason…. Okay, try again….”

They worked through Herbology and History of Magic, then rejoined Crabbe and Goyle in the Great Hall and forced down some dinner. All four of them returned to the empty classroom afterward, using the Invisibility Cloak to avoid the teachers; it didn’t cover them completely when they were all together, but as long as they crowded together and walked slowly, it was good enough. They kept practicing for hours, with Crabbe and Goyle now tasked with retrieving the things that Harry was trying to summon while Draco sat on one of the desks and offered tart suggestions and motivating insults.

At midnight, Harry stood near the blackboard, surrounded by heaps of objects: books, quills, several upturned chairs, Crabbe’s huge boat-like shoes, and a dozen erasers. Only in the last hour had Harry really got the hang of the Summoning Charm.

“That’s not too bad,” Draco said smugly, as though he had been the one doing all the work. “If you don’t lose your head and forget everything tomorrow, you should be all right.”

“Well, now we know what to do next time I can’t manage a spell,” Harry said, throwing one of Crabbe’s shoes back to him so he could try again, “threaten me with a dragon. Right…” He raised his wand once more. _“Accio_ _shoe!”_

The enormous shoe soared out of Crabbe’s hand, flew across the room, and Harry caught it.

“Just as long as it works tomorrow,” Harry said. “The Firebolt’s going to be much farther away than the stuff in here, it’s going to be in the castle, and I’m going to be out there on the grounds….”

“I told you, that won’t matter,” said Draco sharply. “But if it’ll make you feel better, we can sneak it down with us….”

“No,” Harry shook his head, “how would we explain you just happening to bring along exactly what I needed? No, I’m sure I can do it, I just have to concentrate….”

Goyle yawned hugely. “Sure you can,” he said, grinning at Harry. “It’s not that hard.”

Draco rolled his eyes and refrained from pointing out that the few times that evening that Goyle had tried the spell in solidarity to brighten Harry’s spirits, he had succeeded in summoning what he was wanted less than a quarter of the time. “Let’s call it a night,” he suggested instead. “You don’t want to face a dragon on no sleep—or go out in front of the whole school, and probably a photographer or two, with bags under your eyes!”

 

Harry had been focusing so hard on learning the Summoning Charm that evening that some of his blind panic had left him. It returned in full measure, however, on the following morning. The atmosphere in the school was one of great tension and excitement. Lessons were to stop at midday, giving all the students time to get down to the dragons’ enclosure—though of course, they didn’t yet know what they would find there.

Harry felt oddly separate from everyone around him, whether they were wishing him good luck or hissing _“We’ll have a box of tissues ready, Potter!”_ as he passed. It was a state of nervousness so advanced that he wondered whether he mightn’t just lose his head when they tried to lead him out to his dragon, and start trying to curse everyone in sight. Time was behaving in a more peculiar fashion than ever, rushing past in great dollops, so that one moment he seemed to be sitting down in his first lesson, Charms, and the next, walking in to lunch…and then (where had the morning gone? the last of the dragon-free hours?), Professor Snape was gliding over to him in the Great Hall. Lots of people were watching. An overwhelming number of them were wearing yellow. It was like being glared at by a field of daffodils.

“It is time for the champions to assemble,” Snape said, staring into the empty space over Harry’s head. “Follow me.”

 “Okay,” said Harry, standing up, his fork falling onto his plate with a clatter.

“Show Diggory who’s the _real_ Hogwarts champion!” Draco said brightly. Crabbe and Goyle grunted well-wishes of their own through mouthfuls of food, and little Astoria Greengrass squeaked, “Good luck!”

“Yeah,” said Harry in a voice that was most unlike his own.

He left the Great Hall with Professor Snape. He didn’t seem himself either; his sallow face was stiff and set and his black eyes glittered like mirrors through the curtain of his greasy hair. As Snape walked him down the stone steps and out into the cold November afternoon, he cleared his throat.

“Do try not to panic,” he said, “there’s no reason why you ought to. There will be experts on hand, ready to step-in if things go poorly, and Madam Pomfrey is also down there with a goodly supply of medicinal potions, should she be needed.” Snape kept glancing at Harry and then looking quickly away, as though hesitant of meeting his eyes. “Are you listening to me?”

“Yes,” Harry heard himself say. “Yes, I’m not going to panic. I’m fine.”

Snape was leading him toward the place where the dragons were, around the edge of the forest, but when they approached the clump of trees behind which the enclosure would be clearly visible, Harry saw that a tent had been erected, its entrance facing them, screening the dragons from view.

“You shall wait for your turn in there with the other champions,” said Professor Snape, in a crisp voice. “Mr. Bagman is already inside. He will instruct you further.” Snape swallowed hard and then said, briskly, “Good luck, Potter.”

“Thanks,” said Harry, in a flat, distant voice. Snape left him at the entrance of the tent. Harry went inside.

As Harry had suspected, none of the other champions were surprised to discover that they would be facing dragons. If Mr. Bagman thought it was odd that no one exclaimed with surprise over the revelation of the first task, he kept his thoughts to himself. None of them spoke much as they waited, one by one, for their turns. Harry was last; he had drawn the Hungarian Horntail. Listening to Bagman’s excited commentary as each champion faced their dragon was excruciating; the waiting was interminable.

At last, the fourth whistle blew. Harry walked out through the entrance of the tent, the panic rising into a crescendo inside him. And now he was walking past the trees, through a gap in the enclosure fence.

He saw everything in front of him as though it was a very highly colored dream. There were hundreds and hundreds of faces staring down at him from stands that had been magicked there since he’d last stood on this spot. So many of them were dressed in yellow that it made his eyes swim. And there was the Horntail, at the other end of the enclosure, crouched low over her clutch of eggs, her wings half-furled, her evil, yellow eyes upon him, a monstrous, scaly, black lizard, thrashing her spiked tail, leaving yard-long gouge marks in the hard ground. The crowd was making a great deal of noise, but whether friendly or not, Harry didn’t know or care. It was time to do what he had to do…to focus his mind, entirely and absolutely, upon the thing that was his only chance…

He raised his wand.

 _“Accio Firebolt!”_ he shouted.

The Summoning Charm worked, his Firebolt hurtling towards him from the castle, but even better, the moment Harry swung his leg over his broomstick and rose into the air, his fear melted away, left behind along with the ground. He was back where he belonged….

This was just another Quidditch match, that was all…just another Quidditch match, and that Horntail was just another ugly opposing team….

Getting the egg was almost, impossibly, simple—not easy, not painless, but _simple_. He just had to lure the dragon far enough away from her eggs that he could dive beneath her and seize the golden egg from among its cement-colored brethren, like an exceptionally large Golden Snitch. Just a little further—a little further—

And with a huge spurt of speed, he was off, he was soaring out over the stands, the heavy egg safely under his uninjured arm, and it was as though somebody had just turned the volume back up—for the first time, he became properly aware of the noise of the crowd, which was screaming and applauding as loudly as the Irish supporters at the World Cup—

“Look at that!” Bagman was yelling. “Will you look at that! Our youngest champion is quickest to get his egg! Well, this is going to shorten the odds on Mr. Potter!”

Harry saw the dragon keepers rushing forward to subdue the Horntail, and, over at the entrance to the enclosure, Professor Snape, Professor Moody, and Hagrid hurrying to meet him, all of them waving him toward them, their smiles—even Snape’s thin smirk—evident even from this distance. He flew back over the stands, the noise of the crowd pounding his eardrums, and came in smoothly to land, his heart lighter than it had been in weeks…. He had got through the first task, he had survived….

“Well done, Potter,” said Professor Snape as he got off the Firebolt—which from him was extravagant praise. He noticed that Snape’s knuckles were still white, as though he had been clenching his hands tightly for some time. “Now off to Madam Pomfrey, if you please; you’ll need to have that wound sorted-out before you get your score from the judges. Dragon claws,” he added with a trace of his usual sneer, “are not known for their cleanliness.”

“Yeh did it, Harry!” said Hagrid hoarsely. “Yeh did it! An’ agains’ the Horntail an’ all, an’ yeh know Charlie said that was the wors’—”

“Thanks, Hagrid,” said Harry loudly, so that Hagrid wouldn’t blunder on and reveal that he had shown Harry the dragons beforehand.

Professor Moody looked very pleased too; his magical eye was dancing in its socket.

“Nice and easy does the trick, Potter,” he growled.

“Stop dawdling,” Snape ordered, but in a much softer tone of voice than he usually used when telling students what to do. “The first aid tent—now.”

Harry walked out of the enclosure, still panting, and saw Madam Pomfrey standing at the mouth of a second tent, looking worried.

“Dragons!” she said, in a disgusted tone, pulling Harry inside. The tent was divided into cubicles; he could make out Cedric’s shadow through the canvas, but Cedric didn’t seem to be badly injured; he was sitting up, at least. Madam Pomfrey examined Harry’s shoulder, talking furiously all the while. “Last year dementors, this year dragons, what are they going to bring into this school next? You’re very lucky…this is quite shallow…it’ll need cleaning before I heal it up, though….”

She cleaned the cut with a dab of some purple liquid that smoked and stung, but then poked his shoulder with her wand, and he felt it heal instantly.

“Now, just sit quietly for a minute— _sit!_ And then you can go and get your score.”

She bustled out of the tent and he heard her go next door and say, “How does it feel now, Diggory?”

Harry didn’t want to sit still: He was too full of adrenaline. He got to his feet, wanting to see what was going on outside, but before he’d reached the mouth of the tent, three people had come darting inside—Draco, followed as ever by Crabbe and Goyle.

Crabbe and Goyle were both wearing broad smiles, and Crabbe’s face was flushed red with excitement.

“Awesome,” said Crabbe, clenching and unclenching his fists repeatedly.

“Wicked!” said Goyle, clapping Harry on the shoulder and making him stagger.

But Harry was looking at Draco, who looked paler than usual, and whose face was pinched in a bewildered frown. “You know,” Draco said, “it’s possible that Moody and Sirius are right, and somebody really _is_ trying to kill you.”

Harry raised an eyebrow. “Gee,” he said drily, “do you think so?”

Draco shook his head. “I still think it sounds mad, the idea of somebody putting your name in the tournament to hurt you, but…but it doesn’t seem entirely as far-fetched, now.”

Harry snorted. He might have said more, but after all Draco _had_ spent nearly a full day helping him learn the Summoning Charm, whatever he thought; his convictions weren’t as important as his actions.

“Let’s go see my scores,” Harry suggested.

Picking up the golden egg and his Firebolt, feeling more elated than he would have believed possible an hour ago, Harry ducked out of the tent, the others following; Draco now speaking quickly, his uncertainty banished for the moment.

“Nobody else held a candle to you. Diggory was probably the stupidest—no surprise there—he Transfigured a rock into some kind of a dog—”

“Labrador,” Crabbe grunted.

Draco eyed him oddly and continued. “Right…well, he tried to use the dog—the _Labrador_ —as a lure for the dragon. Mind you, he did _get_ his egg, because the Swedish Short-Snout turned out to be every bit as stupid as he was, and she did go for the dog first, but she burned Diggory before he could get away completely—lit his whole head on fire,” Draco chortled, “it was hilarious….

“Anyway,” he went on, talking a little faster when he saw that Harry wasn’t laughing, “Delacour was the best aside from you; she used a charm to put hers into a trance. If the dragon hadn’t snorted some fire when it started snoring she would have gotten out flawlessly, but it lit her skirt on fire—just for a minute, of course, all she had to do was spout some water from her wand and it was no harm done, but it took her a lot longer to put the dragon under than you took to get your egg, so you’ll still score higher than she did….”

“What about Krum?” Harry asked, suddenly remembering that Sirius had warned him about Karkaroff teaching his students the Dark Arts. He wanted to know what kind of magic Krum had used.

“Oh, he’s going to be livid,” Draco cackled, “he didn’t even think of flying! Used the _Conjunctivitis_ Curse—”

“The what?” said Harry.

“Swells the eyes shut,” explained Draco. “Well, it worked—I guess Sirius was right about their weak spots—but the judges took points off because it _really_ upset the dragon, and she trampled a bunch of her eggs. They didn’t like that!”

He broke off from his story telling to laugh as they reached the edge of the enclosure, Crabbe and Goyle joining in a beat behind as usual. Now that the Horntail had been taken away, Harry could see where the five judges were sitting—right at the other end, in raised seats draped in gold.

“The scores are out of ten,” Draco explained quickly, and Harry, squinting up the field, saw the first judge—Madame Maxime—raise her wand into the air. What looked like a long silver ribbon shot out of it, which twisted itself into a large figure eight.

“Oh come on,” Draco complained, “only an eight? What, just because you got slashed a bit? She gave Delacour a nine, and _she_ caught _fire_ ….”

Mr. Crouch came next. He shot a number nine into the air.

“Ha!” said Draco. “That’s more like it!”

Next, Dumbledore. He too put up a nine. The crowd was cheering harder than ever.

Ludo Bagman— _ten_.

“Ten?” said Harry in disbelief. “But…I got hurt…. What’s he playing at?”

“Are you complaining?” Draco said, sounding amused.

And now Karkaroff raised his wand. He paused for a moment, and then a number shot out of his wand too—four.

“A four?” Draco squawked. “Are you serious? That hypocrite—he gave Krum a ten! Wait until my father hears about this outrage! He’ll give old Karkaroff a piece of his mind, all right! Stiffing you like that—who does he think he’s fooling?”

Harry shook his head. “It figures,” he said, disgusted. “Moody told me that cheating is a traditional part of the Triwizard Tournament; I don’t know why we’re surprised that the judges give biased scores, when they’re the headmasters of each school. Of _course_ they’re going to stack the deck in favor of their champions….”

“Well, at least Bagman is on your side,” Draco muttered, glowering at the distant figure of Professor Karkaroff.

Despite the unfair scoring, Harry still felt thrilled as he turned to leave the enclosure. Against Karkaroff, he could stack the approval of the crowd: it wasn’t only Slytherins cheering for him now. When it had come to it, when they had seen what he was facing, most of the school had been on his side as well as Cedric’s…. He didn’t care about the Gryffindors, he could stand whatever they threw at him now.

“Hey Potter!” called Charlie Weasley, hurrying to meet them as they set off back toward the school. “Charlie Weasley, here with the dragon-keepers.” He shook hands with Harry, who remembered just in time that he wasn’t supposed to know who Charlie was; Draco was happy to hold his Firebolt for him so he could get a hand free. “Look, I just wanted to tell you, that was unbelievable,” Charlie said. “The Horntail’s a nasty creature, and you…well, that was some remarkable flying. I don’t know if you noticed yet, but you’re tied with Krum for first place. Good job. Anyway, they told me to tell you you’ve got to hang around for a few more minutes…. Bagman wants a word, back in the champions’ tent.”

Draco said he would wait, which meant that Crabbe and Goyle would too, so Harry reentered the tent, which somehow looked quite different now: friendly and welcoming. He thought back to how he’d felt while dodging the Horntail, and compared it to the long wait before he’d walked out to face it…. There was no comparison; the wait had been immeasurably worse.

Fleur, Cedric, and Krum all came in together. One side of Cedric’s face was covered in a thick orange paste, which was presumably mending his burn. He grinned at Harry when he saw him.

“Good one, Harry.”

“And you,” said Harry, grinning back.

“Well done, _all_ of you!” said Ludo Bagman, bouncing into the tent and looking as pleased as though he personally had just got past a dragon. “Now, just a few quick words. You’ve got a nice long break before the second task, which will take place at half past nine on the morning of February the twenty-fourth—but we’re giving you something to think about in the meantime! If you look down at those golden eggs you’re all holding, you will see that they open…see the hinges there? You need to solve the clue inside the egg—because it will tell you what the second task is, and enable you to prepare for it! All clear? Sure? Well, off you go, then!”

Harry left the tent, rejoined his friends, and they started to walk back around the edge of the forest, talking hard; Harry wanted to hear what the other champions had done in more detail. Then, as they rounded the clump of trees behind which Harry had first heard the dragons roar, a witch leapt out from behind them.

It was Rita Skeeter. She was wearing acid-green robes today; the Quick-Quotes Quill in her hand blended perfectly against them.

“Congratulations, Harry!” she said, beaming at him. “I wonder if you could give me a quick word? How you felt facing that dragon? How you feel _now_ , about the fairness of the scoring?”

“Yeah, you can have a word,” Harry said savagely. “Just as soon as you schedule an appointment with my publicist.” He waved toward Draco, who treated Skeeter to his most disdainful sneer, and together the four boys set off back to the castle.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have decided to offer short Yule Ball Ship Commissions. If anyone is interested, read more about that [here.](https://greeneyedsnake.tumblr.com/post/171736615192/yule-ball-ship-commissions)


	18. Lessons in Dueling

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This section contains a few brief excerpts from Chapter Twenty-One, stretching from page 363 to page 384 of the American hardcover edition, although most of it is new text. Additionally, the Care of Magical Creatures lesson witnessed by Rita Skeeter has been skipped and summarized instead, as repeating that section seemed unnecessary. For details on Skeeter and the skrewts, please refer to the canon source.

Dinner that evening was a boisterous, raucous affair: everyone was elated about the tournament, about the dragons, and about the feats of daring executed by all four champions. The Slytherin table was especially noisy; with not one but _two_ champions sitting among them, the students could barely bring themselves to stop cheering long enough to eat. Krum looked as surly as ever, hunched in over his plate and responding monosyllabically to both questions and congratulations, whether they were coming from Harry’s housemates or from his fellow Durmstrang students, but that didn’t stop people from chattering at him.

Harry, on the other hand, couldn’t get enough of retelling each and every swerve and bank and dive, embellishing the story more and more as the evening wore on. Even Draco came in for a share of the attention, much to his evident pleasure, and he took full credit for suggesting the Firebolt whenever anyone asked. Harry was feeling too pleased with life to mind Draco talking himself up at Harry’s expense; what did it matter who got the credit for the idea, especially when he was the one who had done the flying?

The only thing that dampened Harry’s celebration was his lingering worry over Sirius, but even that was dispelled once he looked through Theodore’s copy of the evening edition of the _Daily Prophet_ and saw, tucked in the very back of the “Crimes and Curiosities” section, a short article which read:

> BURGLARY! The Tewkesbury home of Reginald and Mary Cattermole was broken-into late Sunday night. The intruder was interrupted when the Cattermoles returned around two-thirty in the morning from an unscheduled visit to St. Mungo’s, and fled before he or she could be identified. Stolen were three chickens, one bag of dog food, a spare broomstick, and a small quantity of Floo Powder. Neither the Cattermoles nor their two children were harmed, and Ministry officials do not believe that neighboring wix are in any danger. The family’s dog, which apparently fled from the burglar, returned this morning under her own power, unharmed. M.L.E.P. agents are investigating and anyone with knowledge of this crime is encouraged to contact the Ministry at once!

Harry knew immediately, without any doubt, that the burglar they were looking for was Sirius—not that he was in any hurry to write to the Magical Law Enforcement Patrol and tell them that! He felt the last small, hard knot of tension in his chest ease. He grinned at everyone he could see and leaned forward to listen to Draco badger Krum into finally talking about his own encounter with the dragons.

After dinner Harry and his friends went up to the Owlery, so that Harry could send Sirius a letter telling him that he had managed to get past his dragon unscathed. Bowman was still gone, off delivering Harry’s worried letter from yesterday, and Harry didn’t want to risk using Hedwig, who was too distinctive, so he lured one of the school owls—a little scops owl, who seemed to be mostly eyes and talons—down and tied the letter to its leg while he talked.

“I can’t wait to hear what Sirius thinks of this,” he said cheerfully. “I’m sure he’s been worrying, since we got interrupted before he could tell me what I needed to do. I hope he’s somewhere close enough that he gets this fast.”

Draco nodded distractedly. “What do you reckon the second task’s going to be?” he said. “They won’t want anything anti-climactic, which means it’s probably going to be something even more difficult than dragons, and I shudder to think what _that’s_ going to be….”

“You’re ruining the mood,” Harry told him shortly, and Crabbe snickered.

Harry gently tossed the owl out of the window. The little owl plummeted ten feet before managing to pull himself back up again; the letter attached to his leg was much longer and heavier than usual—Harry hadn’t been able to resist giving Sirius a blow-by-blow account of exactly how he had swerved, circled, and dodged the Horntail. They watched the owl disappear into the darkness, and then Draco said, “Well, let’s head back down to the common room. I’m sure everyone there will be happy to help restore your victorious mood.”

Sure enough, when they entered the Slytherin common room it exploded with cheers and yells again. There were piles of candies and cakes, and bottles of pumpkin juice on the tables. Someone had found several green Slytherin banners, some of them depicting a snake and others merely a big silver S, and they were draped around the common room like bunting, hanging off the skulls on the mantle and dangling from the highest shelves. The posters that Astoria and her friends had made were hanging up as well. Several of the tapestries around the wall had been obscured behind quick sketches that someone had done of Harry—they had to be of Harry, because the figure was riding a broomstick and had a big lightning bolt drawn on his face, although the resemblance otherwise was lacking—flying around the Horntail. There was one with a girl whose robes were burning and another showing a boy—Cedric, Harry assumed—with his head on fire, which made Harry grin, even though the drawing itself was pretty bad. He wasn’t sure if any of the other posters showed Krum; the squiggles were hard to make-out.

Harry helped himself to some peppermint toads; he had almost forgotten what it was like to feel properly hungry, and sat down now with Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle. He couldn’t believe how happy he felt; Sirius was safe, he’d gotten through the first task, and he wouldn’t have to face the second one for three months.

“Bit heavier than a Golden Snitch, eh Potter?” said Miles Bletchley, Keeper on the Slytherin team, picking up the golden egg, which Harry had left on a table, and weighing it in his hands. “Well go on then, open it—let’s see what it’s hiding!”

“The rules of the tournament say that champions are supposed to work those things out on their own,” Adrian Pucey protested, but he was shouted-down by everybody else, most notably Graham Montague, who had yet to forgive Pucey for quitting the Quidditch team last year to focus on his O.W.L.s: “Ah shove it, Pucey, you prat! Let’s see it, Potter!”

“Yeah, go on, Harry, open it!” several people echoed.

Bletchley passed Harry the egg, and Harry dug his fingernails into the groove that ran all the way around it and prised it open.

It was hollow and completely empty—but the moment Harry opened it, the most horrible noise, a loud and screechy wailing, filled the room. Harry had never heard anything like it, not even from the speakers of Dudley’s video games, some of which were quite obnoxious.

“Close it, close it!” Daphne pleaded, hands pressed tight over her ears. “Oh, it’s horrid! Shut it up!”

“What the hell was that?” said Taylor Alden, starring at the egg as Harry slammed it shut again. “Sounded like someone just ran over an entire rack of bagpipes…”

“Maybe it was an Augurey!” Lilian Moon gasped. “Maybe he has to face _death!”_

“Don’t be an idiot,” said Tracey Davis sharply, although her brown cheeks were ashen. “That’s an old myth, augureys cry when it rains, not when somebody is going to die!”

“Whatever it is,” Blaise Zabini said, shuddering, “don’t open it again.”

Harry frowned. “How’m I supposed to figure out the clue if I don’t open it up?” he demanded.

“That’s not my problem,” said Blaise. “You’re the champion; you deal with it. I don’t care where you figure what out, as long as it isn’t somewhere I have to hear it.”

Several people laughed and Harry, grinning ruefully, put the egg aside.

It was nearly one in the morning when Harry finally went down to his dormitory with Draco, Crabbe, Goyle, Theodore, and Blaise. Before he pulled the curtains of his four-poster shut, Harry set his tiny model of the Hungarian Horntail on the table next to his bed, where it yawned, curled up, and closed its eyes. _Really_ , Harry thought, as he pulled the hangings on his four-poster closed, _Hagrid had a point…they were all right, really, dragons…._

The start of December brought wind and sleet to Hogwarts. Drafty though the castle always was in winter, Harry was glad of its fires and thick walls every time he passed the Durmstrang ship on the lake, which was pitching in the high winds, its black sails billowing against the dark skies. He thought the Beauxbatons caravan was likely to be pretty chilly too. Hagrid, he noticed, was keeping Madame Maxime’s horses well provided with their preferred drink of single-malt whiskey; the fumes wafting from the trough in the corner of their paddock was enough to make the entire Care of Magical Creatures class light-headed. This was unhelpful, as they were still tending the horrible skrewts and needed their wits about them.

Hagrid’s attempt to help the skrewts hibernate turned out to be as much of a disaster as Harry would have expected of anything involving the Blast-Ended Skrewts, and it wasn’t enhanced by Rita Skeeter nosing about. He was sure that Hagrid’s agreement to meet with Skeeter for an interview on Friday would only make things worse.

“She’ll twist everything he says,” Harry grumbled as he and his friends walked back up to the castle.

“If she can understand him in the first place,” Draco sneered.

He, Crabbe, and Goyle had hidden in Hagrid’s hut with most of the class while Harry and a few others had helped wrangle the skrewts, so he had no burns to nurse, but that hadn’t stopped him from acting as though he had just weathered an ordeal. Crabbe and Goyle were too excited to get to lunch to care about the skrewts any longer, but Draco kept up a litany of complaints—aided and abetted by Pansy Parkinson—about the Blast-Ended Skrewts in particular and Hagrid in general.

Harry focused on his shepherd’s pie and did his best to tune them out.

Herbology that afternoon was much more enjoyable. Professor Sprout had been acting extremely warm to Harry ever since the first task; Harry suspected that Cedric had told his Head of House about Harry helping him out, and she gave him a bright, beaming smile every time she looked at him.

This turned out to be somewhat of a mixed blessing, because Harry wasn’t used to getting quite so much personalized attention from the Herbology teacher, who usually spread her focus fairly among the whole class and let the students get on with their tasks without getting in their way. His distraction led to a few nicks from the pruning shears he was using to tend his bed of budding Honking Daffodils. He sucked his fingers on the way to History of Magic, and tried to put his worries about Hagrid and Rita Skeeter out of his head.

 

Halfway through Potions on Tuesday afternoon, Harry heard a _“Psst!”_ from behind him and turned around to see Hermione Granger waving to get his attention. Harry looked around nervously but Professor Snape was bent in quiet conversation with Tracey Davis on the other side of the classroom, the scowl on his face indicating that he would probably be there for a while, so Harry scooted his stool back toward the table Hermione was sharing with Ron Weasley and asked, “Yeah?”

He assumed that Hermione wanted to talk to him about the first task, so he was slightly disappointed when she whispered, “I’ve found Winky!”

Harry blinked at her, nonplussed. “You’ve found what?” he said, speaking in a low voice so as not to draw Snape’s attention. They were supposed to be looking up beneficent ingredients that were often mistaken for harmful ones—and vice versa—and making a list of the ways to spot the difference, which meant that a certain amount of whispering would pass without notice given that the students were working in pairs, but Harry was supposed to be working with Draco next to him, not leaning back to talk with Hermione at another table.

“Winky,” Hermione said, staring at him demandingly. “You remember, from the Quidditch World Cup? Mr. Crouch’s poor house-elf!”

“Oh—yeah,” said Harry, wrenching his brain away from dragons and back to that fraught, long-ago summer night. “What about her?” he asked.

“I’ve found her,” Hermione repeated. “She’s here, at Hogwarts. I found her in the kitchens!”

Draco suddenly scooted backwards as well, wrinkling his pointed nose as he stared at Hermione. “You’ve been in the _kitchens?_ ” he asked, his whisper scandalized.

Ron Weasley smirked at him. “Yeah,” he whispered back, “she showed me, too. They’re pretty swell, Malfoy, you should go check them out. The house-elves fawn over you like anything; you should be right at home.”

Draco scowled, but Harry said, before he could start an argument, “What’s Winky doing here?”

“She’s working,” said Hermione. “Well, I say ‘working,’ but really it’s more…weeping. She, er, she isn’t having a very easy adjustment to being free—”

“I should think not!” Draco exclaimed indignantly, loudly enough that a few heads turned in their direction.

Harry looked over his shoulder anxiously, but Snape was still talking to Tracey; Lilian had now joined the discussion, whatever it was, and was punctuating her words with expansive gestures and unnecessarily heavy sighs. Harry turned back to the others and said, “Shh!” sharply to Draco, who ignored him.

“I thought you might like to come and see her,” Hermione suggested to Harry, pointedly not looking at Draco. “It might cheer her up, having visitors, you know?”

Glancing to the side of Hermione, Harry caught Ron’s eye; he was shaking his head silently and mouthing, “Not likely,” but when Hermione turned to look at him, he bent his head over his book and pretended to be engrossed in a comparison of leaf shapes.

“It’s quite easy to get in,” Hermione explained, talking fast now, so that she sounded more like a tea kettle preparing to whistle than a girl. “The door is concealed behind a painting of a bowl of fruit.  It’s only one flight down from the entrance hall, take a left at the bottom of the staircase and you can’t miss it, the whole hallway is full of paintings of food. Find the one with the fruit bowl, tickle the pear, and it will giggle and the painting will open, and—voila! You’re in the kitchens!” She beamed.

“It is worth a visit,” Ron added with a shrug. “The elves are _very_ keen on making sure their guests are happy.” He grinned. “They’ll send you away again with enough cakes to fill your pockets for a week.” He paused, glanced at the table next to Harry’s and Draco’s where Crabbe and Goyle were sitting, staring numbly at their books, and amended his statement to, “Well—a day or two at least.” He sniggered.

“Er,” said Harry, trying to think of a graceful way to decline.

He was saved the effort, whether he liked it or not, by Draco saying, “Visit the _kitchens?_ Visit _house-elves?_ I’d expect nonsense like that from _her_ ,” he said, jerking his chin at Hermione, then turning to sneer at Ron, “but you ought to know better! Wizards and witches don’t belong in _kitchens_.” He shuddered.

Hermione scowled and opened her mouth to reply, but just then, a cold voice above them said, “I do not believe that I assigned this as a group project.”

All four of them gave a little start and glanced up to see Professor Snape looming over them, his black eyes snapping.

“Sorry, professor,” Harry muttered, diving back into his book. Around him, he could hear the others doing the same, although Draco made no effort to rush; he knew he could get away with almost anything in Snape’s class, which worked out well for Harry, because it meant that instead of taking points all Snape did was clear his throat in a rather pointed manner and stalk back to his desk.

When the bell rang, Harry left quickly, more to get away from Snape than Hermione—but his quick exit had the added benefit of saving him from having to talk his way out of visiting the kitchens to see some weepy elf.

 

Defense Against the Dark Arts the following afternoon got off to a rocky start, and went downhill from there. “Wandwork is only part of dueling,” Professor Moody told them, giving the class his usual sharp inspection. “You can’t just fight from the wrist up; it takes your whole body, if you’re going to do it right! So today instead of working on identifying or repelling unfriendly spells, you’re going to practice dodging them.”

“We’re going to _what?”_ squeaked Daphne, her friends hurriedly shushing her when Moody turned to glare at the wilting girl.

Surprisingly, he smiled—which did nothing to reassure the Slytherins.

“No reason to panic, Greengrass. Not yet, anyway.” Moody chuckled; Daphne and Draco both whimpered. “No,” Moody said, rising to his feet to stump across the front of the classroom, “we won’t be starting by having you dodge anything nasty. No point; you wouldn’t have time to learn how to dodge properly if you spend half the class recovering from what hit you before you figure it out. No, we’ll be starting with something painless—but very visible, so you’ll know what you did wrong. Everyone to your feet!” he barked.

The class hurried to rise and clustered together in the middle of the room while Moody waved his wand and whisked all their desks and chairs to the back corner, out of the way. Another flick of his wand conjured dozens of pillows across the stone floors and then he said, “All right, pair up! You’ll take it in turns, one of you attacking and the other dodging. Those of you dodging, put your wands away; I don’t want you tempted to fight back or to try and defend yourself. Attackers, you will be casting Color Changing Charms—and _only_ Color Changing Charms.” Moody’s magical eye roamed the classroom, fixing on each student in turn; he lingered especially on Draco, Crabbe, Goyle, and Theodore Nott.

“Right,” Moody barked, “everyone ready? Begin!”

Harry had at first thought the lesson would be enjoyable, but he quickly learned otherwise: Moody wanted them ducking and diving as though their lives depended on it, and the pillows on the floor had a distressing habit of slipping aside just when an elbow or knee or shoulder was heading toward the hard stone floor. It wasn’t long before Harry felt bruised all over.

Moody didn’t help; he stalked around the classroom, shouting things like, “Hope you like life without your arm, Davis, because you’ve just lost it—see, your whole sleeve’s gone yellow!” or, “Have to be faster than that, Nott, if you want to keep your head attached to your shoulders!” or “Step it up, Potter, you’re letting Malfoy turn you into a paint by numbers over there!”

As the class went on he grew more and more shot-tempered—or perhaps more amused; it was hard to tell with Moody—eventually just barking, “That’s you dead, then!” “You’re dead!” “And you’re dead!” “Dead!” “Dead!” “DEAD!”

As the class dragged into the second hour Moody resumed lecturing them:

“You think a smattering of Shield Charms are going to be enough to protect you in a duel, do you? Think knowing a few hexes and a handful of jinxes is all you need, do you? WRONG! If you’re going to survive what’s out there, you need to be ready—mind, wand, _and body!_ Every inch of you has to be prepared, right down to your toes! You think the Dark Lord got to be the most powerful Dark Wizard in living memory by standing around like a lump and swishing his wand in place? No! He got out there and _fought!_ He got his _hands dirty_ —and so did his Death Eaters! You want to be able to stand up for yourself? Then you have to learn—how—to— _dodge!”_

“This is ridiculous,” Draco muttered, staggering back to his feet and rubbing his elbow (Moody had had them switch partners halfway through the lesson). “What does he think this is, training for some kind of army? This is _school_ , not…not….”

“Boot camp?” Harry suggested, earning himself several confused looks. “Never mind,” he said quickly, and threw a burst of purple at Draco before Moody could spot them dallying.

 It wasn’t as easy as it had looked from the receiving side; Color Changing Charms were not generally used offensively, and aiming them at a moving target was tricky. From the looks of the class—most of whom now resembled the contents of a child’s box of crayons more than the black crows their uniform hats and robes usually put Harry in mind of—everyone had managed to figure it out. Even Crabbe and Goyle seemed to have a handle on the spell for once, which made it a surprise when Moody suddenly roared, “OH NO YOU DON’T, LADDIE!”

A burst of magic sent Goyle tumbling head-over-heels across the sporadic pillows, his wand clattering away in the opposite direction, while Crabbe—who looked like he had walked through a paint store with a sledgehammer; neither he nor Goyle had proved particularly adept at dodging, although they certainly had more enthusiasm for the lesson than Harry’s other classmates—gaped stupidly.

“What—what’d I do?” Goyle mumbled, sitting up and rubbing his head.

“I said Color Changing Charms _only!”_ Moody barked, limping up toward him, wand out and pointed right between Goyle’s eyes.

Goyle stared at the tip of Moody’s wand, his mouth hanging open. “That’s what I did,” he protested.

“You think I don’t know a jinx when I see one, eh?” Moody snarled. “You thought you could slip a spell past _me_ , did you? Well, we’ll see if you feel so clever when I’m done with you!”

“No!” Draco yelped, seemingly involuntarily; he clapped a hand over his mouth and ducked behind Harry, trembling. Moody didn’t turn around, but with his magical eye that didn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t looking.

Goyle flinched, but he looked more confused than scared. “I didn’t do nothing,” he mumbled, while Moody stomped up to his desk. He rifled around through the books and papers piled there while the class held its breath, everyone edging carefully away from Goyle. Even Crabbe backed up. Aside from Professors Snape and McGonagall, Crabbe had little respect for any Hogwarts teachers, but he had treated Moody with caution ever since the incident with the ferret.

“Ah-ha!” Moody exclaimed, making everyone flinch. When he turned back around he had a thick leather-bound book in his free hand. “There we are,” he said, limping back over to Goyle, who was still sitting on the floor. “You’ll be doing some extra work for me, laddie-buck,” Moody said with a vicious grin. “Six inches on the first three plants in here on my desk by Monday—and another six inches on the next three, and so on every week until either I tell you to stop, or you run out of book. Understand?”

Goyle nodded, taking the book, but he mumbled, “I didn’t do nothing,” again under his breath.

Moody ignored him.

“Right!” he bellowed. “And what are _you_ all looking at? Back to work!”

The class hurriedly raised their wands, everyone studiously looking anywhere but at Moody or Goyle.

Soon bursts of color were flying across the room again. By now it wasn’t just the students who looked like they’d walked out of the wrong end of a rainbow: the whole classroom was covered in splotches of color, from the blackboard (now bright teal) to the stones around the windows (now a patchwork of pink, yellow, and puce). The only thing in the room that still looked the same as it had when the lesson had started was Moody himself, stomping around between the pairs of dueling and dodging students, his magical eye whirring and his scarred face wrinkled in a glare of furious concentration.

“Faster, Greengrass!” he barked. “What are you doing, color-coordinating? I don’t care if it clashes, just throw the damn spell!”

“Stop moaning, Nott, it’s just bruised—back on your feet! You think an enemy is going to wait for somebody to come along and kiss your ouches before he cuts your throat open?”

“I said back to work, Moon, that doesn’t mean take a break to check what color’s in your hair!”

“And you, Potter—Malfoy—!”

Harry grimaced, ready for the worst, but Moody just paused, looking them over briefly, before saying gruffly, “Good work. Keep it up.” He limped away before either of them could respond, already shouting, “Put some elbow into it, Bulstrode, you can sling a charm faster than that! Here, I’ll show you how it’s done!”

Draco was so preoccupied with gaping at their professor’s retreating back that he didn’t even try to dodge Harry’s next spell, ending up with a full head of violently violet hair.

Harry winced. “Sorry,” he said. “Er—want to switch again?”

By the time class ended, there were hardly any students who still had so much as a patch of black on their robes, or any untouched pieces of skin; Harry was proud to be among that number, although half his head was pink and his nose was greener than his eyes (one of which was now purple, the other orange). They limped out of the classroom, nursing their bruises and lamenting their multicolored states. Moody had assured them that the coloring would wear off in an hour or two, but none of the class were looking forward to dinner in the Great Hall in this state.

“We’ll be a total laughingstock,” Pansy wailed.

“Cheer up,” Millicent suggested, “the Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws will have already had this lesson by now.”

“Yes,” said Blaise, his elegant drawl a lot more terse than usual—he kept fingering his lilac eyebrows and picking at the pale blue patch on his cheek, as though he could scrap it away with his nails (magenta, yellow, and turquoise) if he worked at it long enough— “But _they_ didn’t have to come and eat in front of the whole school looking like this. We would have noticed if they had.”

“Maybe he didn’t make them do it,” Theodore muttered. “Maybe he thought _they_ didn’t _need_ this lesson.”

“Well, I guess we’ll find out,” Daphne said darkly. “If the Gryffindors show-up at dinner tomorrow looking like they’ve been run-over by a bunch of demented leprechauns, we’ll know he’s giving the same lesson to everyone—not just us.”

“With the Gryffindors,” Pansy said snidely, “do you really think we’ll be able to tell?”

That got a hearty laugh from everyone but Draco, who was distracted by examining the book that Moody had assigned to Goyle for extra work. “What’s this?” he said. _“Magical Water Plants of the Mediterranean?_ What does that have to do with Defense Against the Dark Arts?”

“No idea,” said Harry vaguely; the fifth year Ravenclaws had just come out of Transfiguration, and he was a lot more concerned with ducking behind his friends so that Cho wouldn’t see him looking like a rainbow’s vomit than he was in whatever book Goyle was going to have to try and read.

“Well,” Draco said, hardly noticing the torrent of giggles that their appearance had engendered among the Ravenclaws, “I thought it was going to be a book on hexes or counter-jinxes or something like _that_. This is just…dumb plants.” He wrinkled his nose and shoved the book back at Goyle. “Here,” he said, “you’re on your own with that one. You were stupid enough to let that madman catch you misbehaving, you can figure out how to write the essays he wants.”

“But I didn’t do nothing,” Goyle complained.

Nobody was listening.


	19. The Unexpected Task

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This section contains some scattered excerpts from Chapter Twenty-Two, ranging across pages 385 to 402 of the American hardcover edition. The lengthiest section involves a conversation between Harry and Cho Chang, but as even that is a brief segment, I have chosen not to omit or truncate any scenes in this update.
> 
> TRIGGER WARNING: ABELISM - brief but direct expression of disdain toward an off-screen character's physical condition by another character.

Friday afternoon, Professor Snape granted his students the rare treat of packing up a few minutes before the bell rang. Not wanting to give the sour-dispositioned professor an excuse to regret his generosity, the class did so in whispers, all hurrying to deposit their bottles of Stewed Tentacula Anti-venom in neat rows on his desk. Harry’s solution was a little cloudier than it was supposed to be, but only Draco, Hermione, and Theodore had produced better draughts, so he felt quite proud of his work and took the time to write his name quite largely on the label affixed to his bottle.

As everyone was settling back in their seats, grinning and whispering to one another, Snape rose to his feet. “Gryffindors,” he said, “you are dismissed. Do not forget to complete your essay on the properties of valerian root and spotted toadstools for Tuesday. Slytherins, you will stay behind when the bell rings; I have an announcement to make before you leave.”

The class goggled at him. Snape’s black eyes narrowed with annoyance. “The Gryffindors have already received this information from their own Head of House. I have no more interest in repeating myself to them than I am sure they have in hearing the announcement a second time. Now, I said dismissed!”

The Gryffindors all jumped to their feet, Neville Longbottom rising so quickly that he knocked over his stool. He was red-faced as he stood it back upright, but he still managed to be the first out the door. Ron looked over his shoulder as he left, smirking at Harry; when Harry saw that Finnigan and Thomas were snickering together, and Brown and Patil were smothering giggles in their sleeves, his heart sank. What could Snape possibly have to tell them that was so amusing to the Gryffindor students?

Harry tried to catch Hermione’s eye, hoping for a hint, but she was reading while she walked, her copy of _One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi_ held up close to her nose.

As soon as the last Gryffindor—Parvati Pail, struggling to pull her long braid out of the buckle on her school bag, where it had become tangled in her hurry to rise—had departed and the heavy wooden door swung shut once more, Snape turned his eyes back to the Slytherins, who now stared at him in nervous anticipation.

“As you may or may not have bothered to make note of,” Professor Snape said, his voice sour, “it is almost time for the Yule Ball. This is a traditional element of the Triwizard Tournament and is designed to further social ties between the students of the various involved schools. All students of fourth year or higher are invited automatically, although younger students may attend the ball if they do so as the partner of an older student.”

It would be inaccurate to say that a flood of whispers broke-out; not even the Slytherins would readily speak out of turn in Snape’s class, although they could get away with more than anyone else. Still, there was a sudden tension in the chill dungeon air, a faint gasp of breath drawn into several sets of lungs. Harry suddenly felt the urge to turn around and look at Pansy Parkinson and Daphne Greengrass, and wasn’t sure why; the hair on the back of his neck prickled, as though people were staring at him.

Professor Snape waited for the silence to become more silent, then he continued: “The ball will begin at eight o’clock on December 25th and will last until midnight. It will be held in the Great Hall. You will wear your dress robes, and will not do anything to embarrass either this school or Slytherin House, or you will answer to me.” His black eyes flashed. “Is that clear? I am sure that it will be an evening of” —Snape’s lips curled unhappily— “frolicking and frivolity, and of course you are expected to enjoy yourselves. See to it that you enjoy yourselves in a manner that does not malign the honor of Hogwarts School. Is this understood?”

A ragged chorus of affirmatives answered him; several students seemed to be having trouble restraining laughter, and Harry understood now why the Gryffindors had behaved so oddly as they were leaving. Hearing Professor Snape explain the Yule Ball was uncomfortable; he couldn’t imagine that receiving the announcement from Professor McGonagall had been any less surreal for them.

Mercifully, the bell chose that moment to ring, and the class lurched to its collective feet, eager to get away from the dark glower on Snape’s sallow face. Harry swung his bag onto his shoulder and started for the door, but then—

“Potter! One moment.” Professor Snape pointed demandingly to the space in front of his desk.

Wondering if his potion had not been as satisfactory as he had thought, Harry turned around and walked nervously to Snape’s desk. He saw Draco craning his neck curiously, but he walked out with the rest of the class, leaving Harry alone with Snape.

“Er—yes, professor?” Harry said, with what he hoped was an ingratiating smile.

Snape looked down his long hooked nose at him. “As one of the champions, you will, of course, be opening the ball.”

“Opening the ball—how?” Harry felt his palms start to sweat and rubbed them on the sides of his robes to dry them.

“With a dance, of course,” Professor Snape said impatiently. “It is a ball, after all.”

Harry had a sudden mental image of himself in a top hat and tails, accompanied by a girl in the sort of frilly dress Aunt Petunia always wore to Uncle Vernon’s work parties.

“I’m not dancing,” he said.

“You most certainly are,” Snape retorted. “If you do not know how, I suggest you entreat Mr. Malfoy for lessons, as I will not tolerate you shaming the school by being unable to perform your expected duties.”

“But—” Harry tried to argue, but Snape spoke loudly over his protest:

“I have, myself, attended a few…gatherings with Draco’s parents,” Snape said, looking distinctly unhappy about this fact, “and can attest that Lucius and Narcissa are… _enthusiastic_ dancers. I am certain that they have made sure that their son is well-schooled in the practice.”

Harry gaped at Snape, not sure what he was more horrified by—the thought of asking Draco to teach him how to dance, or the mental image of Snape at a party.

“But— _sir_ ,” Harry protested, desperately.

Professor Snape raised an unsympathetic eyebrow. “You heard me, Potter,” he said. “You had best secure yourself a partner for the ordeal, as it is considered quite bad form for one to attempt dancing with oneself.” Harry wasn’t sure if he was joking or not. “Let me make it quite clear,” Snape continued, in a very dire sort of voice, “that I will not be accepting any excuses or protests on this matter. You are one of the tournament champions; ergo you will open the ball. Is that understood?”

“Yes, sir,” Harry mumbled, and slunk out of the room.

 

A week ago, Harry would have said finding a partner for a dance would be a cinch compared to taking on a Hungarian Horntail. But now that he had done the latter, and was facing the prospect of asking a girl to the ball, he thought he’d rather have another round with the dragon.

Harry had never known so many people to put their names down to stay at Hogwarts for Christmas; he always did, of course, because the alternative was only going back to Privet Drive, but he had always been very much in the minority before now. This year, however, everyone in the fourth year and above seemed to be staying, and they all seemed to Harry to be obsessed with the coming ball—or at least all the girls were, and it was amazing how many girls Hogwarts suddenly seemed to hold; he had never quite noticed that before. Girls giggling and whispering in the corridors, girls shrieking with laughter as boys passed them, girls excitedly comparing notes on what they were going to wear on Christmas night….

“Why do they have to move in packs?” Harry asked Draco as a dozen or so girls walked past them, sniggering and staring at Harry. “How’re you supposed to get one on their own to ask them?”

“You’re not exactly walking around on your own either, you know,” Draco pointed out, looking amused. Harry supposed that he ought to have been grateful that Draco wasn’t sulking over the amount of interest that Harry had been getting ever since the announcement of the Yule Ball; instead he was taking great pleasure in watching Harry’s discomfort, and basking in the spill-over effects of being in such close proximity to the center of everyone’s attention. Harry wasn’t sure that that was better.

“Shut-up,” he said, and glowered as Draco laughed.

 “I don’t see what you’re so twitchy about,” Draco teased him. “You’re a school champion—for crying out loud, you outflew a dragon! Just figure out who you want to take to the ball, and tell them!”

“Shut-up,” Harry said again, feeling his face grow hot. He knew perfectly well whom he’d _like_ to ask, but working up the nerve was something else…. Cho was a year older than he was; she was very pretty; she was a very good Quidditch player; and she was also very popular.

True, Harry had become rather popular himself since the first task, but he didn’t think it was quite the same thing, no matter what Draco said. To his amazement, though, Draco turned out to be quite right.

A curly-haired third-year Hufflepuff girl to whom Harry had never spoken in his life asked him to go to the ball with her the very next day. Harry was so taken aback he said no before he’d even stopped to consider the matter. The girl walked off looking rather hurt, and Harry had to endure Draco’s, Pansy’s, and Blaise’s taunts about her all through Charms. The following day, two more girls asked him, a second year and (to his horror) a fifth year who looked as though she might knock him out if he refused.

“She was a foot taller than me,” said Harry, still unnerved. “Imagine what I’d look like trying to dance with her.”

Hermione’s words about Krum kept coming back to him: “They only like him because he’s famous!” Harry doubted very much if any of the girls who had asked to be his partner so far would have wanted to go to the ball with him if he hadn’t been a school champion. Then he wondered if this would bother him if Cho asked him.

On the whole, Harry had to admit that even with the embarrassing prospect of opening the ball before him, life had definitely improved since he got through the first task. He wasn’t attracting nearly as much unpleasantness in the corridors anymore, which he suspected had a lot to do with Cedric—he had an idea Cedric might have told the Hufflepuffs to leave Harry alone, in gratitude for Harry’s tip-off about the dragons. There seemed to be fewer yellow scarves and ribbons around too, and a few people had even started sporting green ones, sometimes in conjunction with the yellow, which Harry rather liked—it was almost as though he and Cedric were on a team together against the champions from Durmstrang and Beauxbatons, rather than competing on their own. Almost nobody was quoting Rita Skeeter’s article to him anymore—and just to heighten Harry’s feeling of well-being, no story about Hagrid had appeared in the _Daily Prophet_.

“She didn’ seem very int’rested in magical creatures, ter tell yeh the truth,” Hagrid said, when Harry and—reluctantly—Draco had asked him how his interview with Rita Skeeter had gone during the last Care of Magical Creatures lesson of the term. To their very great relief, Hagrid had given up on direct contact with the skrewts now, and they were merely sheltering behind his cabin today, sitting at a trestle table and preparing a fresh selection of food with which to tempt the skrewts.

Harry pretended not to notice Crabbe and Goyle sneaking bites of anything they thought might be tasty when Hagrid and Draco weren’t looking. He knew he’d just feel sick if he thought about it.

“She jus’ wanted me ter talk about you, Harry,” Hagrid continued in a low voice. “Well, I told her we’d been friends since I went ter fetch yeh from the Dursleys. ‘Never had to tell him off in four years?’ she said. ‘Never played you up in lessons, has he?’ I told her no, an’ she didn’ seem happy at all. Yeh’d think she wanted me to say yeh were horrible, Harry.”

“’Course she did,” said Harry, throwing lumps of dragon liver into a large metal bowl and picking up his knife to cut some more. “She can’t keep writing about what a tragic little hero I am, it’ll get boring.”

“Maybe you should tell her about collapsing half the cellars two years ago,” Draco suggested with a cackle, “or helping a mass murderer escape the Ministry—I’m joking, of course!” he added hurriedly, going a bit pale. “The last thing you want is Skeeter getting her talons on those stories….”

“I think I could figure that much out on my own, thanks,” retorted Harry, and Draco sagged with relief.

“Anyway, Hagrid,” Harry asked, changing the subject, “are you going to be at this Yule Ball they’re holding?” Harry thought that if Hagrid showed-up, at least he wouldn’t be the most awkward person on the dance floor.

“Though’ I might look in on it, yeah,” said Hagrid gruffly. “Should be a good do, I reckon. You’ll be openin’ the dancin’, won’ yeh, Harry? Who’re you taking?”

“No one, yet,” said Harry, feeling himself going red again. Draco snickered, but Hagrid didn’t pursue the subject.

The last week of term became increasingly boisterous as it progressed. Rumors about the Yule Ball were flying everywhere, though Harry didn’t believe half of them—for instance, that Dumbledore had bought eight hundred barrels of mulled mead from Madam Rosmerta. It seemed to be fact, however, that he had booked the Weird Sisters. Exactly who or what the Weird Sisters were Harry didn’t know, never having had access to a wizard’s wireless, but he deduced from the wild excitement of those who had grown up listening to the WWN (Wizarding Wireless Network) that they were a very famous musical group.

Even Blaise Zabini, normally a paragon of arrogant dignity, couldn’t hide his eagerness to see the Weird Sisters in person, and Pansy went misty-eyed whenever she talked about them.

Some of the teachers, like little Professor Flitwick, gave up trying to teach them much when their minds were so clearly elsewhere; he allowed them to play games in his lesson on Tuesday, and spent most of it talking to Harry about the perfect Summoning Charm Harry had used during the first task of the Triwizard Tournament. Other teachers were not so generous. Nothing would ever deflect Professor Binns, for example, from plowing on through his notes on goblin rebellions—as Binns hadn’t let his own death stand in the way of continuing to teach, they supposed a small thing like Christmas wasn’t going to put him off. It was amazing how he could make even bloody and vicious goblin riots sound as boring as Theodore Nott’s lectures on the virtues of Arithmancy. Professors McGonagall and Moody kept them working until the very last second of their classes too, and Professor Snape, of course, would no sooner let them play games in class than adopt Neville Longbottom. Staring nastily around at them all, he informed them that he would be testing them on poison antidotes during the last lesson of the term.

“That was clever of him,” Draco snickered as they sat in the common room that evening, “springing a test on us on the last day. I bet half the Gryffindors flunk it completely.”

“They probably won’t be the only ones,” Harry said, eyeing Crabbe and Goyle sidelong. While they had obediently taken their books out at Draco’s command, they were now sitting on the floor in front of the table that held the foursome’s textbooks and notes, playing Gobstones instead. Draco himself was lounging lengthwise across the couch they had abandoned, his own notes equally as forsaken; for once Harry didn’t think he was faking his air of unconcern. Draco had proved to be a natural at remembering which antidotes worked best for which poisons, and probably hardly needed to study.

Harry, on the other hand, was pouring over his own notes with a fierce concentration. He was worried that he was going to somehow embarrass himself, and consequently Slytherin House, at the Yule Ball. The last thing he needed was to have Snape already cross with him over some bad marks when it happened.

He alternated his time between his Potions notes and Goyle’s _Magical Water Plants of the Mediterranean:_ Draco had proved adamant about not helping Goyle with his extra work for “that madman” (probably, Harry thought privately, because he was afraid that Moody would catch-on and turn him into a ferret again for meddling) which meant that Harry had picked up the slack, and was writing at least half of Goyle’s requisite weekly six inches. It was either that, or let Goyle suffer whatever punishment Moody would devise for incomplete work, because Goyle had never managed to write six coherent inches on anything by himself in his life. Harry didn’t want to think about what kind of animal Moody might turn Goyle into if he angered him; the possibilities were all horrifying.

“Say, Harry,” Draco said, after several minutes had passed with nothing more interesting happening than Crabbe overturning the Gobstones board after a particularly viscous squirt caught him in the eye, precipitating an impromptu wrestling match between him and Goyle, “why don’t you put that stuff away and get the egg out? We could have a whack at figuring out its secrets.”

Harry winced; he wasn’t eager to crack the noisome egg again, least of all in front of everyone else in the common room. He had put the golden egg upstairs in his trunk and hadn’t opened it since the celebration party after the first task. There were still two and a half months to go until he needed to know what all the screechy wailing meant, after all.

“Nah,” he said, “not now…it’s Christmas! I think I’ve earned a break from worrying about the tournament. I’ll have plenty of time to work out the answer to the egg after the Yule Ball.”

Crabbe and Goyle—having settled the wrestling match to their own private satisfaction—plopped back onto seats next to Harry’s, Crabbe scrubbing at his still-sticky face with his sleeve. Harry returned his attention to his notes but didn’t get very far, because Draco suddenly asked, “Well what about the Yule Ball, then?”

Harry looked up, feeling vaguely panicky, as he did whenever the ball was mentioned. “What about it?” he said.

Draco rolled his eyes. “You’re a champion, remember? Have you figured out who you’re going to open the dance with?”

“Er—” said Harry. “Not—not quite yet….”

Draco snorted and laced his fingers together behind his head like a pillow. “Well, better hurry it up,” he suggested. “If Snape comes around asking, you’ll want to have an answer for him….”

Harry swallowed hard. “Who are you two going with, then?” he asked Crabbe and Goyle, hoping to shift Draco’s line of inquiry onto another pair of targets. It was more of a challenge than a question, and the two burly boys reacted much the same way they did when called on by a teacher in class: Crabbe stared at him blankly and Goyle looked frantically around the room as though searching for rescue.

Finally Crabbe elbowed Goyle in the side and, looking pleased with himself, said, “We’ll go together.”

Goyle perked up at once. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Good idea.” He settled back with a cheerful grin, his panic gone.

Harry frowned. “Is that…allowed?” he asked.

They stared at him dully. It was Draco who answered: “Well of course it is,” he said, his voice scathing. “What, do you think everybody’s expected to ask someone from Beauxbatons or Durmstrang just because we’re supposed to be ‘furthering international magical cooperation,’ or whatever? Don’t be daft.” He levered himself up onto his elbows and shook his head, as though Harry were being as obtuse as Goyle. “They only brought their finalists, that’s barely a dozen students each, there aren’t enough to go around. Do the math. If we could only go with people from a different school, three-quarters of Hogwarts wouldn’t have any dates at all.” He laughed scornfully and picked up his sheaf of notes, flipping through them idly.

That hadn’t been quite what Harry had meant, but he decided not to try and explain.

“So who have you asked, then?” he demanded. He knew he sounded a little belligerent; he was tired of Draco laughing at him.

Draco didn’t seem bothered by his temper. “Yes, I suppose I had better decide,” he drawled languidly, dropping his notes again. “Well, it’s pretty much got to be either Parkinson or Greengrass, don’t you think?” His tone made it clear that he was speaking rhetorically. “I mean, Blaise is an arse so he’s out, and the three of them are the only ones who are remotely suitable.” His gray eyes lost focus, as though he was drawing up a list of pros and cons in his head. “Well, Daphne’s taller so she’d be nicer to dance with, but Pansy has a better sense of humor so she’d be more fun to spend all evening hanging around with—although if you take the other one, it won’t matter, because we’ll have both of them around, and you’re shorter than I am so you’d be more suited to dancing with Pansy….”

Harry felt panic well-up in his chest at the idea of asking Pansy Parkinson to the Yule Ball. He could practically hear her screeching with laughter already. _Hermione_ , he thought wildly, _I can ask Hermione. She won’t get the wrong idea, and I bet nobody’s asked her yet. Who would dare?_

Before Harry could say anything, Draco swung his feet off the couch and sat up. He scanned the room until his eyes lit on Pansy and Daphne, sitting a few tables away, their dark heads bent close together over something that Harry suspected had nothing to do with notes on antidotes. They made an intimidating pair: boney Pansy’s black hair was cropped short in a severe bob and chubby Daphne’s cascaded down her back in thick curls, but there was something about their faces—maybe the way they smiled, or the way their dark eyes narrowed when they were unhappy—that made them look like they could have been cousins, even sisters.

“Come on,” Draco said, standing and beckoning Harry to follow him. He smirked confidently but Harry’s mouth felt like it had gone completely dry. He tried to form words, to protest, but nothing came out. Moving jerkily, like a puppet on a set of strings, he stumbled after Draco as the blond boy sauntered over toward the giggling girls.

“Hey Greengrass,” said Draco, “you have someone to go to the ball with yet?”

Daphne and Pansy both looked up, Pansy’s brow drawing tight in a scowl, and Daphne’s face turning pink. “Er—yeah,” she said. “I’m going with Morag.”

“Morag MacDougal?” Draco said, wrinkling his pointed nose. “From Ravenclaw? Really? But—she’s only got one hand!”

Daphne frowned. “She has not,” she said sharply. “She’s just got—you know—little nubbins fingers on the one. It’s no big deal, that’s more than enough fingers for dancing.” She tossed her hair over her shoulder and said loftily, “Anyway, she’s pretty, and she’s asked me, and I’ve said yes. So there.”

“Suit yourself,” Draco said. He turned to Pansy. “What about you, Parkinson? You going with anyone?”

Pansy gave Draco a very calculating look. “Why?” she said after a while. “You looking for a date?”

Draco shrugged. “Obviously,” he said. “Why do you think I’m asking? So?”

Pansy hesitated for a long moment, her golden cheeks growing steadily redder by the second. Finally she said, in a breathless sort of voice, “Yeah, all right then.”

Daphne turned to stare at her. “But I thought you were going with—”

Pansy elbowed her friend. “Shut-up,” she hissed. “I’ll just tell him I’ve changed my mind, won’t I?”

Daphne shrugged. “Please yourself,” she said, and returned her attention to the magazine in front of her.

“So, uh, we’ll just meet here then, before the ball?” Pansy said, fluttering her eyelashes at Draco.

“What?” he said distractedly. “Oh, yeah, sure. Makes sense.” He waved a dismissive hand and turned to go, Harry gratefully falling in beside him and avoiding looking at either girl.

“What color are you wearing?” Pansy called after them.

“Black,” Draco shot back carelessly over his shoulder.

“Oh good,” Harry heard Pansy say behind them, “black matches everything, I won’t have to alter my robes at all….”

Harry and Draco returned to their seats, Draco flopping languidly back across the couch while Harry sank into his chair on legs that felt limp and rubbery with relief.

“Too bad,” Draco told him cheerfully, “guess you’ll have to find somebody else to go with. Got to be faster next time, Harry.” He preened as though he had just won a race to the Snitch.

“Yeah,” Harry said, managing a shaky grin, “too bad.”

 

The Hogwarts staff, demonstrating a continued desire to impress the visitors from Beauxbatons and Durmstrang, seemed determined to show the castle at its best this Christmas. When the decorations went up, Harry noticed that they were the most stunning he had yet seen inside the school. Everlasting icicles had been attached to the banisters of the marble staircase; the usual twelve Christmas trees in the Great Hall were bedecked with everything from luminous holly berries to real, hooting, golden owls, and the suits of armor had all been bewitched to sing carols whenever anyone passed them. It was quite something to hear “O Come, All Ye Faithful” sung by an empty helmet that only knew half the words. Several times, Filch the caretaker had to extract Peeves from inside the armor, where he had taken to hiding, filling in the gaps in the songs with lyrics of his own invention, all of which were very rude.

And still, Harry hadn’t asked Cho to the ball. He was getting very nervous now, especially since, as Draco pointed out, he would look stupider than anyone else there if he showed up without a partner, since he was supposed to be starting the dance with the other champions.

“I suppose there’s always Moaning Myrtle,” he said gloomily, referring to the ghost who haunted the girls’ toilets on the second floor.

Draco rolled his eyes. “Would you just find your spine and do it already?” he said on Friday afternoon, in a tone that suggested that his long amusement with Harry’s dithering had finally run out. “If you don’t, I’m going to take drastic measures and ask someone on your behalf—and you won’t like who I choose, I promise!”

“Okay, fine!” said Harry, half-tempted to ask his friend to do just that. When the bell rang, though, he grabbed his bag, and hurried to the dungeon door.

“I’ll meet you at dinner,” he said to Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle, and he dashed off upstairs.

He’d just have to ask Cho for a private word, that was all…. He hurried off through the packed corridors looking for her, and (rather sooner than he had expected) he found her, emerging from a Defense Against the Dark Arts lesson.

“Er—Cho? Could I have a word with you?”

Giggling should be made illegal, Harry thought furiously, as all the girls around Cho started doing it. She didn’t, though. She said, “Okay,” and followed him out of earshot of her classmates.

Harry turned to look at her and his stomach gave a weird lurch as though he had missed a step going downstairs.

“Er,” he said.

He couldn’t ask her. He couldn’t. But he had to. Cho stood there looking puzzled, watching him.

The words came out before Harry had quite got his tongue around them.

“Wangoballwime?”

“Sorry?” said Cho.

“D’you—d’you want to go to the ball with me?” said Harry. Why did he have to go red now? _Why?_

“Oh!” said Cho, and she went red too. “Oh Harry, I’m really sorry,” and she truly looked it. “I’ve already said I’ll go with someone else.”

“Oh,” said Harry.

It was odd; a moment before his insides had been writhing like snakes, but suddenly he didn’t seem to have any insides at all.

“Oh okay,” he said, “no problem.”

“I’m really sorry,” she said again.

“That’s okay,” said Harry.

They stood there looking at each other; and then Cho said, “Well—”

“Yeah,” said Harry.

“Well, ‘bye,” said Cho, still very red. She walked away.

Harry called after her, before he could stop himself.

“Who’re you going with?”

“Oh—Cedric,” she said. “Cedric Diggory.”

“Oh right,” said Harry.

His insides had come back again. It felt as though they had been filled with lead in their absence.

Completely forgetting about dinner, he trudged slowly back toward the dungeons, Cho’s voice echoing in his ears with every step he took. _“Cedric—Cedric Diggory.”_ He had been starting to quite like Cedric—prepared to overlook the fact that they flew the same position in Quidditch, and Cedric was handsome, and popular, and nearly everyone’s favorite champion. Now he suddenly realized that Cedric was in fact a useless pretty boy who didn’t have enough brains to fill an eggcup.

 _Brains_ —that reminded him of something. “Hermione!” Harry gasped. He spun on his heel and raced back to the Great Hall. With luck she would still be at dinner—he skidded inside and paused in the entrance, scanning the Gryffindor table—yes, there she was! Her horrible mane of bushy brown hair was unmistakable, even from across the large room.

Harry hurried over, the bag at his side banging into his leg like a lead weight, and tried not to think about how many people were probably watching him right now. But he had to do this; Draco was right, he couldn’t show-up at the ball alone. Hermione was his best bet. He was sure no one would have asked her, and even better he was reasonably sure that she wouldn’t laugh at him, either when he asked her or when he inevitably stepped on her toes at the dance….

His palms were sweating; he wiped them off on the sides of his robes and stumbled to a halt alongside the Gryffindor table. Thankfully most of the students were too busy eating and talking to pay any attention to him, and even better, Hermione was sitting a little ways apart from everyone else with her nose in a book.

“Er—Hermione?” he said, trying to pitch his voice loud enough to get her attention without attracting that of anyone else. _“Hermione?”_ he tried again, louder.

She looked up with a start, looked around, and smiled when she saw him. “Oh, Harry, hello. What is it?”

“I just—er.” Harry swallowed, forced a smile that he was sure looked hideous, and said, “Well I was just thinking, I need someone to go to the ball with, because the champions have to open the dancing, and I thought, if you didn’t have anyone to go with either, that maybe you could come with me? And then neither of us would have to go alone?” His green eyes filled with pleading.

Hermione’s face softened. “Oh,” she said, “well that’s—that’s very nice of you, Harry, but someone’s already asked me, actually. Thank you, though.”

“Right,” said Harry, “that’s great. Wonderful. Good for you. Um—right then. I’ll just—have a good evening.” He grinned—more of a grimace—and slunk away, feeling his face burning like it was the back-end of a skrewt. By the time he thought to ask Hermione whom she was going with, he was too far away to turn around.

Feeling more miserable than ever—if even Hermione Granger had a date for the ball, and he didn’t, when he was a school champion, what did that say about him?—Harry took one look at the Slytherin table, decided he couldn’t face his friends right now, and headed back out into the entrance hall.

There were a number of people there milling about, chatting with their friends or admiring the decorations before going into the Great Hall. Harry spotted Ginny Weasley in conversation with a blonde girl he didn’t recognize, Ginny’s fiery red hair standing out brightly against the backdrop of evergreen garlands. Harry’s eyes lit up; that was a perfect solution. Ginny Weasley was only a third year, so she wouldn’t be able to go to the ball on her own or with any of her classmates, and Harry had saved her life only two years ago—surely she would still be grateful enough to go to the Yule Ball with him now!

Grinning with relief and elation, Harry pushed his way through the crowd of admirers hanging around Fleur Delacour, and came up beside Ginny just as she was turning away from her friend.

“Hey,” said Harry, “got a minute?”

“Oh,” said Ginny, looking startled, “Harry, yes, of course. What’s up?”

This was much easier than asking Cho; Harry found that he had no trouble getting the words out clearly this time. “Do you want to go to the ball with me?”

Ginny’s brown eyes went wide; then her face fell. “I can’t,” she said, sounding pained. “I’m going with—with Neville. He asked me when Herm—well, he asked me anyway, and I thought…well…I’m not going to be able to go otherwise, I’m not in fourth year.” She looked extremely miserable.

“Oh,” said Harry. He felt suddenly very small and very empty. That was his last idea, gone. “All right then,” he said. “I…I guess I’ll see you at the ball, then.”

“Yeah,” said Ginny, and she swallowed hard. “Yeah, I guess you will. Excuse me, Harry…I think I’ll go and have dinner now….” Without a word to her friend, she walked off toward the Great Hall, her head bowed.

The blonde girl stared at Harry without speaking, or blinking; her gray eyes seemed unnaturally protuberant and they made Harry feel like he was sitting on a dissection table. He wasn’t sure what she was waiting for. “Er,” he said. “Good evening, then.”

“Good evening,” the girl said dreamily, and walked past Harry as though she were floating.

Harry shook his head and turned to head for the dungeons, but just then there was a sudden commotion behind him, and he turned back around to see what was happening.

Ron Weasley, his freckled face gone dead white, was standing in front of Fleur Delacour, his mouth hanging open like someone had just punched him in the stomach. All around Ron, people were staring, and starting to giggle. The laughter spread while Fleur stared at Ron, a very cold expression on her lovely face.

“Did—did he really just ask—?”

“He did, he asked her! He asked _her!_ Oh Merlin’s teeth!”

Ron’s jaw worked; he looked like he was about to speak; then suddenly, he turned and bolted for the stairs. A burst of laughter followed him. Fleur frowned, tossed her hair back over her shoulder—several people sighed—and turned back to continue her conversation. When Harry saw who she was talking to—Cedric Diggory—a sudden, hot rush of hatred filled him. Why had he ever told Diggory about the dragons?

He was distracted by the sight of Ginny Weasley running past everyone, away from the Great Hall, away from the onlookers; she shouted her brother’s name, but Ron was already halfway up the stairs and not slowing down.

A few more people chuckled, but most seemed to be of the opinion that the show was now over, and it was time to eat; the entrance hall began to empty. Harry’s stomach rumbled and he found, to his surprise, that he was hungry after all. He debated against going in—he still didn’t feel ready to face his friends—but in the end, he decided that dinner couldn’t possibly make him feel worse, and maybe it would help fill up the empty hole that had opened in his middle.

He dropped his bag on the floor and flopped heavily into a seat next to Goyle, who nodded at him amiably without pausing his furious mastication of an unfortunate drumstick. Draco looked up from his plate of roast chicken and potatoes. “Well?” he demanded. “Who did you ask? What did they say?”

Harry shook his head. “She said no,” he said quietly, dishing chips onto his golden plate. “It doesn’t matter who I asked, because she said no, she’s already going with someone else.”

“Did I see you over at the Gryffindor table?” Pansy Parkinson asked suspiciously, leaning in across Theodore Nott to glare at Harry. “You had better not have asked Hermione Granger….”

“I asked Cho Chang,” Harry snapped, scowling at Pansy, “not that it’s any of your business, only she’s already going with Cedric Diggory, so I guess I wasted my time.”

“Hmph,” said Pansy, miffed, but she withdrew back into her seat with a muttered, “Well that’s not _so_ bad, then.”

Harry spent a few more minutes frowning in Pansy’s direction before turning to his plate and beginning to savagely attack his food. The emptiness inside wasn’t being filled up, but it was quickly turning into anger and dismay. Who was he going to take to the ball? What if he _did_ show up without a partner—what would Snape do to him? Would they kick him out of the tournament if he failed to fulfill a champion’s duty to open the dance? A few weeks ago, before the Horntail, that thought would have been tempting—but he wasn’t ready to call it quits now, and besides, if it was that easy to remove someone from the tournament, surely Dumbledore would have done it the moment Harry’s name had come out of the goblet…no, he was just going to have to find someone to go to the dance with, one way or another….

“What did you want to go with Chang for?” Draco asked waspishly. “She’s pretty enough I guess, but she flies Seeker for Ravenclaw, Harry. She’s the _competition_.”

Harry shrugged. “At least we’d have had something to talk about,” he said dully. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter now.”

“I guess not.” Draco picked at his potatoes. “Well, who are you going to take, then?” he said after a few minutes had gone by. “You’re running out of time, you know.”

Harry gritted his teeth. “Believe me,” he said, “I know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anyone is interested, you can read the first of the Yule Ball Ship Commissions stories I have posted [here](https://greeneyedsnake.tumblr.com/post/172177432172/yule-ball-commissions-draco-and-astoria). It features Draco Malfoy and Astoria Greengrass and contains no overtly romantic content but is, I think, nonetheless pretty adorable!


	20. The Yule Ball

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This section contains several scattered excerpts from Chapter Twenty-Three, stretching from page 403 to page 432 of the American hardcover edition.

Despite the very heavy load of homework that the fourth years had been given for the holidays, Harry was in no mood to work when term ended, and spent the week leading up to Christmas enjoying himself as fully as possible along with everyone else. The Slytherin Dungeon was hardly less crowded now than during term-time; it seemed to have shrunk slightly too, as its inhabitants were being so much rowdier than usual. Harry’s lack of partner for the Yule Ball cast a shadow over his fun, but he did his best to ignore the cold clawing feeling of panic in his stomach every time he thought about the dance. He whiled-away his time playing Gobstones or Exploding Snap with Crabbe or Goyle, or hanging around the Quidditch pitch with Draco, talking about various plans with which they might convince Viktor Krum to join them for some flying practice.

In the early days of the holiday there was a sudden outbreak of prank candy that resulted in the consumer turning—thankfully briefly—into a very large canary. Harry wasn’t sure where the candies were coming from, but he and the other Slytherins soon learned to treat food anybody else offered them with extreme caution, in case it had one of those Canary Creams concealed in the center.

Crabbe and Goyle both proved spectacularly incapable of resisting temptation, especially Goyle, and consequently spent a lot of time molting.

Snow was falling thickly upon the castle and its grounds now. The pale blue Beauxbatons carriage looked like a large, chilly, frosted pumpkin next to the iced gingerbread house that was Hagrid’s cabin, while the Durmstrang ship’s portholes were glazed with ice, the rigging white with frost. The house-elves down in the kitchen were outdoing themselves with a series of rich, warming stews and savory puddings, and only Fleur Delacour seemed to be able to find anything to complain about.

“It is too ‘eavy, all zis ‘Ogwarts food,” they heard her saying grumpily as they left the Great Hall behind her one evening (Harry looking around for Ron Wealsey, in case another opportunity for a laugh arose). “I will not fit into my dress robes!”

“Which would be a real tragedy,” Pansy Parkinson said darkly, as Fleur went out into the entrance hall.

“I think it would,” Daphne Greengrass retorted earnestly, and blushed. “I for one am looking forward to seeing what the students from Beaxbatons consider fashionable, thank you,” she added in a lofty voice.

“Probably something that shows a lot of skin,” Pansy sneered, “so she can spend the whole evening shivering and complaining that it’s cold.” She glowered at the retreating sheen of Fleur’s silvery hair. Pansy had been moody over the last week, alternating between giggly excitement and surliness. Harry suspected that she was offended to have been Draco’s second choice to take to the Yule Ball, but was too excited about the dance to sulk properly.

Draco didn’t seem to have noticed.

Both he and Harry immediately _did_ notice when Bowman, Draco’s eagle owl, came soaring across the entrance hall toward them. Harry’s eyes were drawn to the scroll of parchment tied to his leg; that had to be a response from Sirius!

Draco hurried forward, raising his arm for Bowman to land on; he looked slightly bewildered by the fact that the owl hadn’t come into the Great Hall with the rest of the post owls, but Harry figured that Bowman had probably only just returned from wherever Sirius was hiding. He untied the letter and crammed it into his pocket; while he was eager to read Sirius’s reply, he didn’t want to do it in here, in front of everyone who was now staring at him, Draco, and the large eagle owl.

“All right,” Draco said, scratching Bowman’s head perfunctorily, “you’ve done your job and made quite the show of it too, thank you. Off to the Owlery now, if you please!”

Bowman hooted and took off obediently, soaring out of sight with a few flaps of his long wings.

Harry, Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle hurried back to the Slytherin Dungeon to read the letter.

Everyone in the common room was much too busy letting off more holiday steam to observe what anyone else was up to. Harry and Draco, with Crabbe and Goyle positioned like a large living screen in front of them, sat apart from everyone else by one of the tall windows that looked out into the dark lake, and Harry read out:

> _Dear Harry,_
> 
> _Congratulations on getting past the Horntail. Whoever put your name in that goblet shouldn’t be feeling too happy right now! I was going to suggest a Conjunctivitis Curse—_ “Ha!” whispered Draco, “Good thing you didn’t listen to him! You would have looked like you were copying Krum, nobody would have been excited by that!” — _but your way was better, I’m impressed._
> 
> _Don’t get complacent, though, Harry. You’ve only done one task; whoever put you in for the tournament’s got plenty more opportunity if they’re trying to hurt you. Keep your eyes open—particularly when the person we discussed is around—and concentrate on keeping yourself out of trouble._
> 
> _Remember what I said about the possibility of someone duping those close to you, too. You aren’t the only one who needs to be careful!_
> 
> _Keep in touch, I still want to hear about anything unusual._
> 
> _Sirius_

“He sounds exactly like Moody,” said Harry quietly, tucking the letter away again inside his robes. “‘Constant Vigilance!’ You’d think I walk around with my eyes shut, banging off the walls….”

“Ehh,” said Draco mockingly, “maybe not _quite_ that bad….”

Harry made a rude gesture with his free hand.

“He does make one good point, though,” Draco said, sobering. “You haven’t even looked at the egg again—not that you’ve told _me_ , anyway.”

Harry rolled his eyes. “I’m not going to try and solve it without you,” he said. “What kind of an idiot would I have to be, to pass up help? Especially after you already helped me with the Horntail? But come on, lighten up…there’s plenty of time yet to figure out the egg. Besides,” he added cajolingly when Draco didn’t look mollified by the flattery, “how’m I supposed to concentrate with all this noise going on? I won’t even be able to hear the egg over this lot.”

“I don’t know about that,” Draco said, “you’d probably be able to shut them up right-quick if you let that thing start screeching again,” but he eventually let himself be convinced to join the others in a game of Exploding Snap instead. By the time they were done, Goyle had no eyebrows left, but this was such a common occurrence that he didn’t seem to mind.

 

The Tuesday before Christmas, panic overtook Harry. He walked out of the Great Hall abruptly halfway through breakfast and sat down on the front steps of the school, staring out at the grounds. He hadn’t brought his cloak, and he was soon shivering, but he didn’t go back inside. The Yule Ball was only four days away and Harry still hadn’t found anyone to go with. He was beginning to regret turning down that fifth year; he might have looked stupid dancing with a girl so much taller than him, but not nearly as stupid as he would look trying to dance by himself.

“Why didn’t I listen to Draco and ask Cho sooner?” he muttered, only realizing he had spoken aloud when a voice behind him said quietly, “To go to the ball, you mean?”

Harry looked up with a start. Ginny Weasley stood a few steps above him, a tiny frown etched between her pale brows. Harry felt his face start to heat, and turned around again. “Yeah,” he said, staring out across the frosted lawn. It was easier to say, “I don’t have anyone to go to the ball with yet,” when he looked at the school grounds instead of at the girl behind him.

For a while there was silence, but Harry refused to look up at Ginny again. If she was going to tease him for not having a partner, he’d rather not be looking her in the eye at the time. Instead of speaking, though, she walked slowly down the stairs until she reached the one he was sitting on, and then she sat down next to him.

“I’m sorry,” she said. To Harry’s surprise, she actually sounded it.

Harry grunted. He didn’t want her pity, but at the same time, he wasn’t going to refuse it.

Several minutes passed with neither of them speaking, just sitting there staring at the cold lawn. The Durmstrang ship bobbed gently at its mooring in the middle of the lake and, somewhere down by Hagrid’s cabin, the Beauxbatons carriage stood. Harry felt a sudden urge to go light one or both of them on fire, but he was sure that neither would burn easily. Even if they did, that wouldn’t help him: the Yule Ball would still happen, and Harry would still have to walk in alone. He wondered what Professor Snape would do—would he give Harry detention, or just poison him right on the spot?

Ginny said something in a voice too small for Harry to hear.

“What?” he asked, turning to face her.

She was looking away from him, staring resolutely out across the grounds. He saw her take a deep breath, her shoulders shaking slightly beneath the thick wool of her hand-knit jumper. “I said,” Ginny repeated, “I could probably get someone for you, if you wanted.”

Harry stared at her. “What—to go to the ball with me?”

Ginny nodded, still not looking at him. “There’s a girl I’m friends with in Ravenclaw. She’s in my year, and I _know_ nobody has asked her. She’s really nice, I’m sure she’d say yes.”

Harry frowned. “What’s the catch?” he asked.

Ginny gave a bark of laughter and her face split, for a moment, into a smile. “The catch is she’s pretty weird, actually. But I like her.” She glanced at Harry, and then away again quickly. “We started hanging out near the end of my first year—after you saved me from Tom Riddle, you know?” Ginny’s voice was thick, but her words brisk, as she continued: “Everybody knew I’d been taken down in the Chamber, of course, even though they didn’t know that I’d been the one who’d been opening it, so they all wanted me to talk about it. It didn’t matter how many times I told them that I’d been unconscious while everything was happening, that I hadn’t woken up until we were all in the Hospital Wing—they just kept _asking_. Especially my dormmates; they wouldn’t leave me alone. Well, we had Transfiguration with the Ravenclaws, and one day everybody was giving me a hard time afterward during morning break, until Luna—that’s her name, Luna Lovegood—she shouted that there was a Blibbering Humdinger in the hallway and when everybody turned to look at her, I slipped away. She found me after, and apologized, and asked if I was all right. She didn’t ask me anything about the Chamber of Secrets. When I asked her why she didn’t seem curious about something that everybody else was so keen on, you know what she said?”

Harry shook his head, transfixed; it hadn’t occurred to him that Ginny Weasley’s ordeal hadn’t ended when Tom Riddle’s diary had been destroyed, and now he felt quite thick for not realizing that sooner. Plenty of people had pestered him and his friends to talk about what had happened down in the Chamber, after all; of course Ginny would have been asked about it, too.

She smiled wryly and told him, “Luna said that she couldn’t imagine that I wanted to talk about it, because if I had wanted to, surely I would have by then. So she said she was all right not knowing, because the asking seemed to hurt me. And this from a Ravenclaw, mind you; they aren’t exactly known for being tactful when there’s something they’re curious about, you know?”

Harry snorted. “Right,” he agreed, grinning.

Ginny shrugged. “Well, we started spending more time together after that. Luna really _is_ as weird as everybody says, mind you, but she’s…well, she’s extraordinarily kind too. If you just want to sit quietly for a while, Luna will sit with you and not say a word. And if you want to talk, she listens—I mean really listens, you know, doesn’t just nod her head and wait for her chance to say something.”

“Er,” said Harry, feeling his face go hot again as he thought about how many times he had sat through conversations just like that, “right. That must be nice.”

“Yeah, it is,” Ginny said. A smile played around her lips again and she added, “I’ve gotten folks to lay off of her a bit, too. They don’t mind teasing Luna when she’s on her own, because she won’t fight back—I don’t even think it bothers her, most of the time.” Ginny shook her head, then caught Harry’s eye for a moment and said, “But it bothered me, and I made sure they knew it. Most bullies will back off once you give them a good hex or two.”

Harry chuckled weakly, feeling suddenly uncomfortable and not knowing quite why. “I bet,” he said, when it seemed like Ginny was waiting for him to say something.

She sighed and her smile faded. “Anyway,” she said briskly, “do you want me to ask her for you?”

“Would you?” said Harry desperately.

Ginny jerked her head in a stiff nod. “Sure,” she said. “No problem.”

“Thanks, Ginny. I don’t know what I’d do without you,” said Harry, meaning the words with every fiber of his being.

 

Harry awoke very gradually on Christmas Day. Yawning, he stretched his arms over his head and rolled over, staring vaguely at the dark green curtains around him. There was barely enough light to see by, and for several minutes, Harry thought seriously about going back to sleep. The sound of muffled whispers and tearing paper changed his mind; he pulled back the curtains around his four-poster, took his glasses from his bedside table, and put them on. Crabbe and Goyle were already awake, sitting on their beds, piles of half-opened presents in front of them.

For a moment, Harry was startled; this was the first Christmas that he hadn’t been alone in his dormitory, but thanks to the Triwizard Tournament, all five of the boys that he shared a room with had stayed at school this year. Harry looked around. There was a pile of presents, most of them small and rectangular—probably books—at the foot of Theodore’s bed; a slightly larger pile at the foot of Blaise’s, all of them tied with very fancy ribbons; and an enormous sprawl of presents spilling out past the sides of Draco’s bed.

Harry looked at his own, much smaller, pile of presents, and decided that as long as he was awake he might as well get down to some present-opening too. He started with the envelope from the Dursleys, which consisted of a soft cloth for cleaning his glasses—a vast improvement over their usual presents; Harry suspected they were still rattled by the Malfoys, and trying to put on a good front; Hermione had given Harry a book called _Quidditch Teams of Britain and Ireland;_ the Malfoys, an elegant wand holster, which made Harry grin sheepishly; Sirius a handy penknife with attachments to unlock any lock and undo any knot; and Hagrid, a vast box of sweets including all Harry’s favorites: Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans, Chocolate Frogs, Drooble’s Best Blowing Gum, and Fizzing Whizbees. There was also, of course, the usual package from Mrs. Weasley, who had been giving Harry Christmas presents ever since he had saved her daughter’s life near the end of his second year: she had sent him a new jumper (green, with a picture of a dragon on it—Harry supposed her dragon-keeper son had told her all about the Horntail), and a large quantity of homemade mince pies. His best present, though, was definitely the one from Draco: a shiny black hooded dragonhide capelet that looked like it could well have come from a Hungarian Horntail. “Wow,” Harry whispered, and grinned.

The others, having much larger stacks of presents, were taking longer to unwrap theirs, especially Theodore Nott, who paused to glance through every book before moving on to his next package. Harry was content to wait and watch, munching idly on a mince pie; it was quite as good as the fudge he had gotten last year.

“Eurgh,” Draco suddenly exclaimed, “why do they keep _sending_ this rubbish?”

Harry turned to see what had so upset his friend and found him staring at a lumpy package as though it might contain a Blast-Ended Skrewt, his pointed face twisted up in disgust.

“What is it?” Harry asked.

“It’s from the _Weasleys_ ,” Draco said darkly.

Crabbe and Goyle perked-up at once. “Ooh,” said Crabbe, “did she send you any of her fudge?”

“She does good fudge,” Goyle confirmed.

Draco stared at them, wrinkling his nose still further, then finally shook his head and said, “You two have no standards at all, do you know that? Why, I reckon you’d break bread with a Mud—a _Muggle_ , even, as long as they fed you. Here,” he said suddenly, chucking the package at Goyle, whose bed was nearest. “If you like it all that much, you can have it. I,” he added loftily, raising his nose in the air, “always throw mine away.”

Goyle gaped at Draco as though he had just admitted to lighting racing brooms on fire for fun; Crabbe didn’t look at Draco at all, but rather lunged from his bed onto Goyle’s, grabbing for the lumpy package. A furious struggle ensued, during which the package had its wrapping torn away; a hand-knitted jumper tumbled loose, which the both of them ignored, as well as a wrapped bundle of what was surely at least a dozen mince pies, which they dived for, cracking their skulls together with a hollow _thud_.

Harry laughed heartily. “It actually was very good fudge,” he assured Draco, “and the pies this year are good too.”

“I don’t care,” Draco said petulantly. “I refuse to eat anything that was given to me by a—by a _blood-traitor_.”

“Why is a blood-traitor even sending you presents in the first place?” Blaise Zabini asked, looking scandalized.

Draco just muttered something unintelligible, so Harry explained: “Remember two years ago, with the Chamber of Secrets, and Ginny Weasley being kidnapped by the monster?” he asked.

“Avidly,” drawled Blaise. “So?”

“So…remember how it was the four of us who saved her?”

Blaise’s lip curled and Theodore started to snicker. “Those are gratitude-pies?” he said. “That’s you-kept-my-daughter-from-being-eaten-by-a-monster pie?” He laughed harder. “Oh that’s rich!”

Harry shrugged. “I’m not saying it’s a _fair_ reward,” he said, “but it is a tasty one. I’m not stupid enough to turn it down, just because I don’t like the person who made it.”

Draco’s eyes widened with sudden horror. “Oh Merlin,” he said, “you don’t think—you don’t think she made it _herself_ , do you?” he asked.

Harry frowned. “Of course,” he said. “That’s what homemade means, isn’t it?”

But Draco shuddered. “Eurgh,” he said, “a witch _cooking_. That’s so…so _inappropriate.”_

Theodore looked vaguely distressed as well, but Blaise cackled nastily. “I bet they don’t even have a house-elf,” he said. “I mean—they live in a hovel, don’t they? What would they even do with one?”

“You don’t think she cooks _all_ their food, do you?” Theodore asked weakly.

“Probably,” said Blaise, with a sharp grin. “Probably does the _cleaning_ , too.”

Theodore covered his eyes. “Oh, Merlin,” he moaned.

Harry, who wasn’t sure why his housemates found the idea of somebody cooking or cleaning their own home so upsetting, turned to Crabbe and Goyle and said, “Did you lot get jumpers, too?”

“Yep,” said Goyle thickly through a mouthful of pie, “wanna see?”

Both Goyle’s and Crabbe’s jumpers, once they had pulled them on, were a bit strained across the shoulders; apparently both boys had grown more since they had last seen Mrs. Weasley than she had anticipated. Harry had to admit that the jumpers weren’t bad, though: Crabbe’s was maroon with a wiggly blue stripe across the chest, and Goyle’s was cream and orange in a chevron pattern.

Harry snagged Draco’s off the floor and held it up. It was purple with a stripe of green diamonds across the chest, outlined in cream, with thick cream cuffs. “This is very nice, Draco,” he said, grinning. “I don’t see why you won’t wear it.”

“Yeah, go on Malfoy,” said Crabbe, chortling, “try it on! Let’s see if it fits!”

“I refuse,” said Draco, shifting backwards on his bed, as though he hoped to use his other presents as a sort of barricade against them.

Blaise and Theodore were both grinning now as well, though, and they walked over to join Harry in examining the jumper. “Oh Malfoy,” drawled Blaise, “this looks just your style, yes, I really think you ought to wear it.”

“You’re not funny,” said Draco peevishly, “and I’m not going to wear it.”

Theodore’s eyes glittered. “But think how _delighted_ the Weasleys will be, seeing the four of you walking around in their mother’s jumpers.”

Draco hesitated.

“You know,” Harry said, nodding thoughtfully, “it probably _would_ annoy them….”

“Oh bloody hell, give it here then,” Draco snapped, and snatched the jumper out of Harry’s hands. “But I’m telling everybody that you tossers made me wear the wretched thing!”

They spent most of the morning in the Slytherin Dungeon, where everyone was enjoying their presents, then returned to the Great Hall for a magnificent lunch, which included at least a hundred turkeys and Christmas puddings, and large piles of Cribbage’s Wizarding Crackers. When they walked in (Harry doing his best not to laugh at the sight of his friends, none of whom owned trousers, wearing their jumpers overtop of their robes) they didn’t draw much attention at first, although Pansy and Millicent snickered when they saw them, until Draco leaned across the table and whispered that it was all a plot at the Weasleys’ expense. “Well,” Pansy said, eyeing Draco’s jumper dubiously, “I suppose it’ll be worth it, if it wipes the smirks off their faces….”

“Exactly,” said Draco, preening, although Pansy didn’t look entirely convinced.

Harry supposed he shouldn’t have encouraged the idea. He had after all put a fair amount of effort into coaxing his friends to get along better with Hermione and her friend, Ron Weasley, this year than they usually did, and tweaking the Weasley siblings’ noses would do nothing to entice the other half of that equation to meet the Slytherins halfway—but it was Christmas, and Harry thought he deserved a little fun.

Since Crabbe and Goyle were usually two of the last people to leave any meal, it wasn’t hard to wait until the Weasleys had all gone outside, and then follow them. The snow was untouched except for the deep channels made by the Durmstrang and Beauxbatons students on their way up to the castle—but the Weasleys seemed keen to change that, since they promptly started a snowball fight.

Harry led the way over to where Hermione was watching their antics and said, “Merry Christmas!” quite cheerfully, as though he had nothing more in mind than wishing to thank her for the book she had given him—which he did, quite politely, and grinned while Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle gave Hermione their own Christmas wishes. Harry thought they overdid their enthusiasm a bit, but Hermione didn’t seem to notice; going rather pink in the face, she thanked them and returned their greetings, happily gossiping with all four of them about the imminent ball. Now that Harry’s worries over not having a date had vanished, he found the topic a lot more fun to speculate on.

It wasn’t until Ginny jogged over, clumps of snow in her red hair, to say hello that anyone noticed their jumpers. She took one look at the dragon on Harry’s chest, rolled her eyes, and cried, “Oh mum!” This caught the attention of her brothers, who walked over to see what was going on.

Fred and George eyed the four Slytherins balefully, but Ron wore a sort of forced, awkward smile on his face as he muttered, “Merry Christmas, then.” He directed his comment more to Harry than the others, but Draco was too busy posing to show-off his jumper to notice, and neither Crabbe nor Goyle ever noticed much until someone else pointed it out to them first.

“Mum’s been busy this year,” Ginny said, smiling wryly as she jerked a thumb over her shoulder at their four jumpers. The Weasleys and Hermione were all wearing jumpers of their own in various colors and patterns; Harry was sure that they, too, had been Christmas presents from Mrs. Weasley.

At the sight of Harry, Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle all in their new jumpers, the twins stopped dead, staring. Ron’s cheeks reddened and he scowled, glanced at Hermione, coughed, and turned around to start squashing more snow into balls for throwing.

“Like them?” Draco asked, tweaking the shoulders of his jumper. “I think they’re rather obnoxious myself, but Harry said it would be keeping in the charitable spirit of the holiday to accept them anyway. It would be terribly rude to reject a gift, after all—especially such _heartfelt_ ones.”

He smirked nastily and the twins’ faces darkened. Harry suddenly regretted his idea for a bit of fun, and said, “Er—right. Tell your mum we said thanks, will you?”

“Yeah,” said one of the twins grimly, “we’ll be sure to pass it along.”

“Very next time we see her,” said the other, his voice even more sepulchral.

Ginny rolled her eyes. “Oh stop being prats,” she said, and threw a snowball at the twin nearest her.

It hit him in the side of the head and he squawked, dove for a handful of snow, and flung it back at Ginny. Soon a flurry of flying snowballs broke out and Harry found himself joining in before he could think better of it. Since Crabbe and Goyle never passed up an opportunity for any kind of fight, they jumped right in, but after a handful of snow slipped down his collar, Draco called them all a bunch of barbarians and retreated to the edge of the battleground next to Hermione, where he was safe from further bombardment.

They didn’t stay out long—both Crabbe and Goyle and the twins became increasingly brutal the longer the snowball fight lasted, and by unspoken mutual agreement, Harry and Ron called things quits after only an hour or so, before anyone could get hurt. The Slytherins returned to their common room to warm-up, dry-off, and remove their jumpers—their purpose having now been served.

Draco kicked his across the room and left it lying there in a pile, but Harry hung his over the foot of his bed to dry. Even after his unexpected shopping trip with Aunt Petunia before the Quidditch World Cup, he still didn’t have very many nice clothes, and all of those had been meant for warmer weather. Draco could say what he liked about Mrs. Weasley’s jumpers; Harry intended to keep wearing his.

Besides, he liked remembering his flight against the dragon.

There was no Christmas tea today, as the ball included a feast, so the Slytherins entertained themselves in their dungeon common room for the rest of the afternoon. As the evening wore on, people started slipping away one-by-one to go get changed, causing Harry’s nerves to become increasingly tense until shortly before seven o’clock, when Draco announced that it was time for them to get ready.

Harry and the other Slytherin fourth year boys changed into their dress robes down in their dormitory, Harry feeling very self-conscious, especially when he compared himself to handsome Blaise Zabini, who looked more elegant than ever in his silver and sky-blue robes. Draco, in high-necked black velvet, was nearly as striking. Even Theodore Nott, wearing navy blue, looked less rabbity than usual. Harry surveyed himself in the long mirror in the corner with a growing feeling of inferiority, and made one last vain attempt to flatten his hair.

He felt a little better once Draco pointed-out that Goyle had put his robes on backwards. Like Harry, both he and Crabbe were wearing green, but in lighter shades than Harry’s dark bottle green robes: Crabbe’s a rich moss-color and Goyle’s more yellowish, like a thick pea soup. Harry wasn’t worried about not standing-out in their company. In fact, if he could have arranged it, he would have had all his friends wear the exact same color he was, in an attempt at camouflage. As it was, when they fell into flanking positions in their usual places behind Harry and Draco, he felt like he was trailing his own complement of back-up dancers—a thought that almost made him laugh out loud, although he didn’t think sharing it with Crabbe or Goyle was a good idea.

The common room looked strange, full of people wearing different colors instead of the usual mass of black. Pansy Parkinson was waiting for Draco at the top of the stairs. She had on very frilly robes of pale pink. Her short black hair was held back by an elaborate silver-and-pink bow and her narrow eyes were shining like torches. Daphne Greengrass, whose date would be meeting her later, was standing next to Pansy. Daphne, in puce purple with her dark curls coiled on top of her head, looked equally as pretty as her friend but less impatient.

Draco looked them both over with an appraising eye. Harry could see him comparing their heights—Daphne was only average, but Pansy was even shorter—doubtless thinking about how much more appropriate Daphne would have looked on his arm, but in the end all he said was, “Pretty robes.”

Pansy flushed and did a little spin. “Do you think so?” she asked, and giggled. “You look very handsome too of course, Draco.” She glanced at Harry, standing awkwardly beside him, and added, “And even you’ve cleaned up well, Potter.”

Harry felt his face go hot and muttered something that he hoped sounded polite.

“Well, if we’re all here, let’s get going,” Draco said impatiently. Pansy attached herself to his arm, looking like it would take an Expulsion Jinx to shake her loose, and said giddily, “Yes, let’s!”

“Okay,” said Harry, wishing he could just stay in the common room. Theodore Nott, who had flatly refused to take _any_ partner to the dance, smirked at Harry as he passed him on the way out of the stone archway.

The entrance hall was packed with students too, all milling around waiting for eight o’clock, when the doors to the Great Hall would be thrown open. Those people who were meeting partners from different Houses were edging through the crowd trying to find one another. Daphne broke away from the others to go look for Morag MacDougal as Fleur Delacour walked past, looking stunning in robes of silver-gray satin, and accompanied by Ravenclaw Quidditch Captain, Roger Davies.

Harry looked around, wondering how he was going to find Ginny’s friend in this crowd. Fortunately he didn’t have to wonder for long: he spotted a mane of bright red hair moving through the crowd toward him and, a moment later, Ginny Weasley herself pushed her way between two Beauxbatons boys and came to a halt in front of the small group of Slytherins.

 “Hello,” said Ginny in a low voice, sparing a cold glance at Draco and Pansy before refocusing on Harry. “Harry, this is Luna Lovegood. Luna, Harry Potter.” The smile she gave Harry looked a little funny, like she wasn’t feeling well; he wondered if it was nerves.

“Hi,” Harry said, and then— “Oh. Um. Hello.”

The blonde girl with the big gray eyes whom Harry had seen Ginny talking to earlier stepped up beside her. She was wearing robes of eye-smarting orange trimmed in yellow. There were teal stars around the bottom, trailing bright silver tails; they looked like they had been painted on by hand and one on the side had smeared slightly. She had a huge silver bow on the top of her head, what looked to be orange radishes hanging from her ears, and a necklace of mismatched, rainbow beads that hung nearly to her knees. She still had the same vague, dreamy expression on her face that she had worn the last time Harry had seen her, and her loose hair hung in straggles over her shoulders. He could practically hear Draco’s and Pansy’s jaws falling open behind him.

“You look—um,” he said, words failing him.

Behind him, he could hear Draco starting to laugh: a soft, weak little sound, as though he was so overcome he could barely breathe. Pansy had yet to comment or move; she seemed to be frozen in shock.

In the end it was Goyle who finished Harry’s sentence: “Your robes are real bright,” he said. “I like ‘em.”

Luna turned her gray, bulbous eyes on him. “Thank you,” she said. “Daddy sent them just last night. Are you all wearing green because you’re hoping to ward-off Sliverpaffs?”

Harry didn’t know what to say to that. He turned back to Ginny, who seemed torn between laughing and crying. “Thanks…I think,” he said.

Ginny snorted. “Sure,” she said, “happy to help.” There was something wrong with her voice, too; Harry wondered if she was coming down with a head cold.

“Well, anyway…I’d better get back to Neville,” Ginny said unenthusiastically. “Have fun, Harry…Luna….”

“Oh yes.” Luna turned around to face Ginny. “Fun. Yes, I would like to. Thank you.” She turned back around as Ginny, with another limp little smile, hurried away. “And thank you, Harry Potter, for inviting me to go to the Yule Ball with you. It was a very kind thing of you to do—and for Ginny to suggest, when she couldn’t go with you herself. She is a terribly nice person, even if she sometimes likes to pretend she isn’t, you know.”

“Er,” said Harry, wondering if this had been a terrible mistake, “sure. You’re welcome.”

“Don’t worry,” Luna continued earnestly, “Ginny explained to me that we’ll need to dance when the ball begins, and I’m ready to do my part in the execution of traditional tournament activities with you.”

Behind him, Draco’s amusement finally burst forth in great, gasping peals of mirth. Harry, feeling his face go hot, did his best to ignore his friend. He would stop eventually, when he ran out of air.

The oak front doors opened, and everyone turned to look as the Durmstrang students entered with Professor Karkaroff. Krum was at the front of the party, accompanied by a pretty girl in blue robes Harry didn’t know. Over their heads he saw that an area of lawn right in front of the castle had been transformed into a sort of grotto full of fairy lights—meaning hundreds of actual living fairies were sitting in the rosebushes that had been conjured there, and fluttering over the statues of what seemed to be Father Christmas and his reindeer.

Then Professor McGonagall’s voice called, “Champions over here, please!”

Harry looked at Draco, desperately, but there was no help for him in his friend’s pointed face; he was still laughing at Luna Lovegood. Harry shook his head, muttered, “See you in a minute,” to him and Pansy—who had crammed her free hand over her mouth, possibly to restrain her own laughter; the other she still had wrapped around Draco’s arm, clutching it possessively.

Harry sighed and started to walk away, but Luna didn’t seem to realize that she needed to move too. Harry had to grab her by the wrist and tug her along after him, like a brightly colored balloon. They walked forward, the chattering crowd parting to let them through, several people goggling at Luna as she passed. She didn’t seem to notice the stares, or the tittering laughter that followed in her wake.

Professor McGonagall, who was wearing dress robes of red tartan and had arranged a rather ugly wreath of thistles around the brim of her hat, told them to wait on one side of the doors while everyone else went inside; they were to enter the Great Hall in procession when the rest of the students had sat down. Fleur Delacour and Roger Davies stationed themselves nearest the doors; Davies looked so stunned by his good fortune in having Fleur for a partner that he could hardly take his eyes off her. Cedric and Cho were close to Harry too; he looked away from them so he wouldn’t have to talk to them. His eyes fell instead on the girl next to Krum. His jaw dropped.

It was Hermione.

But she didn’t look like Hermione at all. She had done something with her hair; it was no longer bushy but sleek and shiny, and twisted up into an elegant knot at the back of her head. She was wearing robes made of a floaty, periwinkle-blue material, and she was holding herself differently, somehow—or maybe it was merely the absence of the twenty or so books she usually had slung on her back. She was also smiling—rather nervously, it was true—but the absence of her usual frown of concentration was almost as startling as her tamed hair. For once, her overlarge front teeth didn’t look entirely out of place on her face.

“Hi, Harry!” she said. “Hi—er,” she said, staring at Harry’s partner in confusion.

“This is Luna Lovegood,” Harry said. “She’s…a friend of Ginny’s.” He didn’t say anything else, because he didn’t know what else to say.

Luna was staring at Hermione with what Harry was beginning to realize was her usual unblinking fascination. Several other people were staring at Hermione too, but much more rudely. When the doors to the Great Hall opened, Krum’s fan club from the library stalked past, throwing Hermione looks of deepest loathing. Pansy gaped at her as she and Draco walked by, and he looked so stunned that for once he was absolutely speechless. He had, at least, finally stopped laughing, which Harry decided to view as a positive. Ron Weasley, however, walked right past Hermione without looking at her.

Once everyone else was settled in the Hall, Professor McGonagall told the champions and their partners to get in line in pairs and to follow her. They did so, and everyone in the Great Hall applauded as they entered and started walking up toward a large round table at the top of the Hall, where the judges were sitting.

The walls of the Hall had all been covered in sparkling silver frost, with hundreds of garlands of mistletoe and ivy crossing the starry black ceiling. The House tables had vanished; instead, there were about a hundred smaller, lantern-lit ones, each seating about a dozen people.

Harry concentrated on not tripping over his feet. Luna didn’t seem to be concentrating on anything; Harry had to keep a hand on her elbow to keep her from wandering off.  He caught sight of Ron Weasley again as he neared the top table. Neville Longbottom and Ginny were standing next to him, Ginny looking small but radiant in her simple taupe robes. Ron was wearing the horrible maroon robes that had so amused Draco on the Hogwarts Express, although the lace was gone. He was watching Hermione pass with narrowed eyes.

Dumbledore smiled happily as the champions approached the top table, but Karkaroff wore an expression remarkably like Ron’s as he watched Krum and Hermione draw nearer. Ludo Bagman, tonight in robes of bright purple with large yellow stars, was clapping as enthusiastically as any of the students; and Madame Maxime, who had changed her usual uniform of black satin for a flowing gown of lavender silk, was applauding them politely. But Mr. Crouch, Harry suddenly realized, was not there. The fifth seat at the table was occupied by Percy Weasley, one of Ron and Ginny’s older brothers.

When the champions and their partners reached the table, Harry found himself shuffled into the seat next to Percy. He was wearing brand-new, navy-blue robes and an expression of such smugness that Harry thought it ought to have been fined. At that moment, he looked so full of himself that he could have even given Draco a run for his money—every last Galleon of it.

“I’ve been promoted,” Percy said before Harry could even ask, and from his tone, he might have been announcing his election as supreme ruler of the universe. “I’m now Mr. Crouch’s personal assistant, and I’m here representing him.”

“Why didn’t he come?” Harry asked. He wasn’t looking forward to being lectured on whatever rule-breaking was upsetting the former prefect tonight, nor on having Percy hug him again, which were the only two sorts of interactions he had ever had with this member of the Weasley family.

“I’m afraid to say Mr. Crouch isn’t well, not well at all. Hasn’t been right since the World Cup. Hardly surprising—overwork. He’s not as young as he was—though still quite brilliant, of course….”

Harry tuned the rest of Percy Weasley’s rambling out and looked around the Hall instead. Luna was doing the same thing with much less subtlety, but Harry had a feeling that it wasn’t because she was bored by Percy: dreamy fascination seemed to be the only expression she had.

There was no food as yet on the glittering golden plates, but small menus were lying in front of each of them. Harry picked his up uncertainly and looked around—there were no waiters. Dumbledore, however, looked carefully down at his own menu, then said very clearly to his plate, “Pork chops!”

And pork chops appeared. Getting the idea, the rest of the table places their orders with their plates too. Harry glanced up at Hermione to see how she felt about this new and more complicated method of dining—surely it meant plenty of extra work for the house-elves?—but for once, Hermione didn’t seem to be thinking about S.P.E.W. She was deep in talk with Viktor Krum and hardly seemed to notice what she was eating.

Unlike the terse, mumbled conversation that Harry was familiar with from sharing a table with the Durmstrang students at meals in the Great Hall, Krum was practically waxing euphoric now, his gruff voice bright and animated.

“Vell, ve have a castle also, not as big as this, nor as comfortable, I am thinking,” he was telling Hermione. “Ve have just four floors, and the fires are lit only for magical purposes. But ve have grounds larger even than these—though in vinter, ve have very little daylight, so ve are not enjoying them. But in summer ve are flying every day, over the lakes and the mountains—”

“Now, now, Viktor!” said Karkaroff with a laugh that didn’t reach his cold eyes, “don’t go giving away anything else, now, or your charming friend will know exactly where to find us!”

Dumbledore smiled, his eyes twinkling. “Igor, all this secrecy…one would almost think you didn’t want visitors.”

“Well, Dumbledore,” said Karkaroff, displaying his yellowing teeth to their fullest extent, “we are all protective of our private domains, are we not? Do we not jealously guard the halls of learning that have been entrusted to us? Are we not right to be proud that we alone know our school’s secrets, and fight to protect them?”

“Oh I would never dream of assuming I know all Hogwarts’ secrets, Igor,” said Dumbledore amicably. “Only this morning, for instance, I took a wrong turning on the way to the bathroom and found myself in a beautifully proportioned room I have never seen before, containing a really rather magnificent collection of chamber pots. When I went back to investigate more closely, I discovered that the room had vanished. But I must keep an eye out for it. Possibly it is only accessible at five-thirty in the morning. Or it may only appear at the quarter moon—or when the seeker has an exceptionally full bladder.”

Harry snorted into his plate of goulash. Percy Weasley frowned, but Harry could have sworn Dumbledore had given him a very small wink.

Meanwhile Fleur Delacour was criticizing the Hogwarts decorations to Roger Davies.

“Zis is nothing,” she said dismissively, looking around at the sparkling walls of the Great Hall. “At ze Palace of Beauxbatons, we ‘ave ice sculptures all around ze dining chamber at Chreestmas. Zey do not melt, of course…zey are like ‘uge statues of diamond, glittering around ze place. And ze food is seemply superb. And we ‘ave choirs of wood nymphs, ‘oo serenade us as we eat. We ‘ave none of zis ugly armor in ze ‘alls, and eef a poltergeist ever entaired into Beauxbatons, ‘e would be expelled like _zat_.” She slapped her hand onto the table impatiently.

Roger Davies was watching her talk with a very dazed look on his face, and he kept missing his mouth with his fork. Harry had the impression that Davies was too busy staring at Fleur to take in a word she was saying.

“Absolutely right,” he said quickly, slapping his own hand down on the table in imitation of Fleur. “Like _that_. Yeah.”

Harry looked around the Hall. Hagrid was sitting at one of the other staff tables; he was back in his horrible hairy brown suit and gazing up at the top table. Harry saw him give a small wave, and looking around, saw Madame Maxime return it, her opals glittering in the candlelight.

Hermione was now teaching Krum to say her name properly; he kept calling her “Hermy-own.”

“Her-my-oh-nee,” she said slowly and clearly.

“Herm-own-ninny.”

“Close enough,” she said, catching Harry’s eye and grinning.

When all the food had been consumed, Dumbledore stood up and asked the students to do the same. Then, with a wave of his wand, all the tables zoomed back along the walls leaving the floor clear, and then he conjured a raised platform into existence along the right wall. A set of drums, several guitars, a lute, a cello, and some bagpipes were set upon it.

The Weird Sisters now trooped up onto the stage to wildly enthusiastic applause; they were all extremely hairy and dressed in black robes that had been artfully ripped and torn. They picked up their instruments, and Harry, who had been so interested in watching them that he had almost forgotten what was coming, suddenly realized that the lanterns on all the other tables had gone out, and that the other champions and their partners were standing up.

Harry tripped over his dress robes as he stood up, then had to tug Luna to her feet when she didn’t immediately follow him. The Weird Sisters struck up a slow, mournful tune; Harry walked onto the brightly lit dance floor, dragging Luna along with him, carefully avoiding catching anyone’s eye (he could see Draco and Crabbe waving at him and sniggering), and then he stood there awkwardly for a long moment, unsure of what to do. He glanced sideways to see that the others had already started dancing and, steeling himself, he took Luna’s hands. Someone in the crowd laughed; Harry refused to look around to see who.

Luna seemed to know even less about what was required of a dance than Harry, but she let him pull her around in slow circles without objecting. She even swayed to the music, although since her swaying was in opposition to the direction Harry had been trying to lead them, it was rather counterproductive. He kept his eyes fixed over the heads of the watching people, and very soon many of them too had come onto the dance floor, so that the champions were no longer the center of attention. Neville Longbottom and Ginny were dancing nearby—he could see Ginny wincing frequently as Longbottom trod on her feet—and Harry smirked, pleased to see someone doing worse than him.

Dumbledore was waltzing with Madame Maxime. He was so dwarfed by her that the top of his pointed hat barely tickled her chin; however, she moved very gracefully for a woman so large. Mad-Eye Moody was doing an extremely ungainly two-step with Professor Sinistra, who was nervously avoiding his wooden leg.

Luna, either noticing where Harry’s eyes were wandering or just coincidentally looking in the same direction, said suddenly, “He was forced to retire after being poisoned by Cornelius Fudge’s secret agents within the Department of Mysteries, you know.”

Harry turned around so quickly that he stepped on Luna’s foot, but she didn’t seem to mind. “What?” he asked. “You’re talking about Moody?”

She nodded vaguely. “Oh yes. The real shame is, nobody knows what he discovered that made Minister Fudge want to get rid of him, because the poison affected his memory. That’s why Professor Moody refuses to drink anything that anybody else gives him, now.”

Harry stared at the wide-eyed girl.

“Are you serious?” he asked.

Luna nodded. “Oh yes,” she said.

Harry realized that he had frozen on the spot and heard the final, quavering note from the bagpipe with relief. The Weird Sisters stopped playing, applause filled the hall once more, and Harry let go of Luna at once.

“Let’s sit down, shall we?”

“All right,” said Luna, and drifted away from the dance floor in Harry’s wake as the Weird Sisters struck up a new song, which was much faster.

They passed Morag MacDougal and Daphne Greengrass, who didn’t seem to be finding her partner’s lack of fingers in any way inconvenient, and Adrian Pucey, who was enthusiastically twirling a girl from Durmstrang. Harry looked around for Draco and Pansy but couldn’t spot them; they were probably, he thought, still dancing.

In fact, Harry realized that he couldn’t spot anyone he knew well who wasn’t out on the dance floor. He saw Lilian Moon, whose crimson robes perfectly matched her newly-charmed hair. He saw Hannah Abbott, whose yellows robes clashed badly with her natural blonde. He saw Blaise Zabini, chatting idly with three Durmstrang boys and a Beauxbatons girl, and looked away quickly before he accidentally made eye contact with any of them. He couldn’t even spot Crabbe and Goyle, whom he was sure would not be on the dance floor. He was starting to regret leaving it so fast, with no further plan in mind. Then Harry spotted Ron Weasley sitting by himself at a table against the wall in his horrible old robes, and thought the sight looked remarkably like salvation.

“How’s it going?” Harry asked Ron, sitting down and opening a bottle of butterbeer.

Ron didn’t answer. He was glaring at Hermione and Krum, who were dancing nearby. Luna, now looking vaguely around at the ceiling, sat down on Harry’s other side.

“There is a very high concentration of Wrackspurts over here,” Luna announced.

“What?” said Ron.

“What?” said Harry, who was now watching Cho and Cedric.

“Wrackspurts,” Luna repeated calmly. “They’re invisible. They float in through your ears and make your brain go fuzzy.”

“Oh,” said Harry. He and Ron exchanged a bewildered glance. Harry shook his head and whispered, “She’s _your_ sister’s friend.” Ron shrugged.

When the song ended, Hermione came over and sat down in the chair next to Ron. She was a bit pink in the face from dancing.

“Hi,” said Harry. Ron didn’t say anything. “Hello,” Luna said in her vague, dreamy way.

“It’s hot, isn’t it?” said Hermione, fanning herself with her hand. “Viktor’s just gone to get some drinks.”

Ron gave her a withering look. _“Viktor?”_ he said. “Hasn’t he asked you to call him _Vicky_ yet?”

Hermione looked at him in surprise. “What’s up with you?” she said.

“If you don’t know,” said Ron scathingly, “I’m not going to tell you.”

Hermione stared at him, then at Harry, who shrugged.

“Ron, what—?”

“He’s from Durmstrang!” spat Ron. “He’s competing against Potter and Diggory! Against your friend! Against Hogwarts! You—you’re—” Ron was obviously casting around for words strong enough to describe Hermione’s crime, _“fraternizing with the enemy,_ that’s what you’re doing!”

Hermione’s mouth fell open.

Harry jumped to his feet and pulled Luna up after him. He mumbled something about wanting more drinks, but Hermione and Ron were too busy yelling at each other to hear him. Harry got out of there fast, Luna trailing obligingly behind him; he didn’t want to hear what Ron was going to accuse _him_ of doing with “the enemy,” given that the Slytherin students had been hosting the visitors from Durmstrang at their table in the Great Hall for every meal since they’d arrived.

“’Fraternizing with the enemy,’” he grumbled, more to himself than to Luna, “what’s wrong with him? I mean, sure, I want Hogwarts to win this tournament as much as anyone—probably more!—but isn’t the, like, the real point supposed to be ‘international magical cooperation,’ or something?” He shook his head, scowling at the distant, still shouting figures of Hermione and Ron.

When a voice at his elbow spoke, he jumped; he had forgotten Luna was still there, despite having pulled her away with him.

“Oh, but that’s not really what he’s upset about, of course,” she said serenely, also watching the shouting match. Other people were starting to stare as well. “That’s just the excuse he’s told himself so he doesn’t have to admit what’s actually bothering him.”

Harry eyed her uncertainly. “And what’s that?” he asked, wondering what weird story she was going to come out with this time.

Luna turned to stare at Harry, surprise in her popping eyes. “Isn’t it obvious?” she said. “He’s upset that Hermione Granger came to the ball with Viktor Krum instead of with him.”

Harry snorted. “What?” he said. “Give off.”

Luna shrugged, not bothered by Harry’s disbelief; he supposed she was probably used to that.

“You don’t think—come on, Luna, Ron doesn’t _fancy_ Hermione. They’re just friends.”

“Hmm,” said Luna curiously, “I’m not sure that I would ever describe having friends as being ‘just’ anything, but I suppose you would know better than me. I’ve never had any friends before—although I think Ginny is, maybe. I suppose I ought to ask her.”

Luna’s habit of not blinking was very unnerving when she was staring you in the eye from only a few inches away.

“Come on,” Harry said, breaking her gaze. “Let’s—let’s get some air.”

“All right,” said Luna, as vaguely agreeable as ever. “If you don’t like the air right here, maybe the air outside will be better?”

Harry, who been implying exactly that, rolled his eyes and led the way to the exit. They edged around the dance floor, past Hufflepuff student Justin Finch-Fletchley and Ravenclaw Padma Patil, both of them dancing with boys from Beauxbatons, and slipped out into the entrance hall. The front doors stood open, and the fluttering fairy lights in the rose garden winked and twinkled as they went down the front steps, where they found themselves surrounded by bushes; winding, ornamental paths; and large stone statues. Harry could hear splashing water, which sounded like a fountain. Here and there, people were sitting on carved benches. He and Luna set off along one of the winding paths through the rosebushes, but they had gone only a short way when they heard a surprisingly familiar voice.

“…don’t see what there is to fuss about, Igor.”

“Severus, you cannot pretend this isn’t happening!” Karkaroff’s voice sounded anxious and hushed, as though keen not to be overheard. “It’s been getting clearer and clearer for months. I am becoming seriously concerned, I can’t deny it—”

“Then flee,” said Professor Snape’s voice curtly. “Flee—I will make your excuses. I, however, am remaining at Hogwarts.”

Snape and Karkaroff came around the corner. Snape had his wand out and was blasting rosebushes apart, his expression most ill-natured. Squeals issued from many of the bushes, and dark shapes emerged from them.

“Ten points from Ravenclaw, Fawcett!” Snape snarled as a girl ran past him. “And ten points from Hufflepuff too, Stebbins!” as a boy went rushing after her. “And what are you two doing?” he added, catching sight of Harry and Luna on the path ahead. Karkaroff, Harry saw, looked slightly discomposed to see them standing there. His hand went nervously to his goatee, and he began winding it around his finger.

Harry, suddenly freshly embarrassed by the oddness of Luna’s robes and her general air of dottiness, felt his face go hot. “Nothing,” he said, “just—just walking, sir.”

“Keep walking, then,” Professor Snape ordered, and he brushed past them, his long black cloak billowing out behind him. Karkaroff hurried away after Snape. Harry and Luna continued down the path.

“They didn’t seem very happy,” Luna observed calmly.

 “And since when have Karkaroff and Snape been on first-name terms?” said Harry slowly.

“Oh I don’t know,” said Luna, starting to turn around, “I suppose we could go ask them—”

“No!” Harry grabbed her arm and yanked her back. “No, they don’t—I don’t think they want to be bothered right now.”

“All right,” said Luna amiably, letting Harry pull her away down the path.

They had reached a large stone reindeer now, over which they could see the sparkling jets of a tall fountain. The shadowy outlines of two enormous people were visible on a stone bench, watching the water in the moonlight. And then Harry heard Hagrid speak.

“Momen’ I saw yeh, I knew,” he was saying, in an oddly husky voice.

Harry and Luna froze—or at least, Harry froze, and since he had been practically dragging Luna along with him, she stopped too, watching him. This didn’t sound like the sort of scene they ought to walk in on, somehow…. Harry looked around, back up the path, and saw Fleur Delacour and Roger Davies standing half-concealed in a rosebush nearby. He tapped Luna on the shoulder and jerked his head back toward them, meaning that they could easily sneak off that way without being noticed (Fleur and Davies looked very busy to Harry), but Luna, her dreamy expression curious, wafted forward toward the fountain, and Harry was now pulled along in her wake. Panicking, he grabbed her other hand, and yanked her deeper into the shadows behind the reindeer before she could step around it and greet Hagrid and Maxime.

“What did you know, ‘Agrid?” said Madame Maxime, a purr in her low voice.

 Luna opened her mouth to speak but Harry put a finger hurriedly to his lips. She closed her mouth again obediently and leaned in, apparently fascinated by a beetle crawling along the stone reindeer’s back. Harry wondered if she had even noticed that Hagrid and Madame Maxime were there, or if she was too interested in the bug to realize they were eavesdropping on what should have been a private conversation.

Harry definitely didn’t want to listen to this; he knew Hagrid would hate to be overheard in a situation like this (he certainly would have)—if it had been possible he would have put his fingers in his ears and hummed loudly, but that wasn’t really an option. Instead he tried to interest himself in the insect too, but the beetle just wasn’t interesting enough to block out Hagrid’s next words.

“I jus’ knew…knew you were like me…. Was it yer mother or yer father?”

“I—I don’t know what you mean, ‘Agrid….”

“It was my mother,” said Hagrid quietly. “She was one o’ the las’ ones in Britain. ‘Course, I can’ remember her too well…she left, see. When I was abou’ three. She wasn’ really the maternal sort. Well…it’s not in their natures, is it? Dunno what happened to her…might be deal fer all I know….”

Madame Maxime didn’t say anything. And Harry, in spite of himself, took his eyes off the beetle and looked over the top of the reindeer’s antlers, listening…. He had never heard Hagrid talk about his childhood before.

“Me dad was broken-hearted when she wen’. Tiny little bloke, my dad was. By the time I was six I could lift him up an’ put him on top o’ the dresser if he annoyed me. Used ter make him laugh….” Hagrid’s deep voice broke. Madame Maxime was listening, motionless, apparently staring at the silvery fountain. Luna tried to draw Harry’s attention back to the beetle but he shook her off, too intrigued now to remember that he didn’t want to overhear any of this. “Dad raised me…but he died, o’ course, jus’ after I started school. Sorta had ter make me own way after that. Dumbledore was a real help, mind. Very kind ter me, he was….”

Hagrid pulled out a large spotted silk handkerchief and blew his now heavily.

“So…anyway…enough abou’ me. What about you? Which side you got it on?”

But Madame Maxime had suddenly got to her feet.

“It is chilly,” she said—but whatever the weather was doing, it was nowhere near as cold as her voice. “I think I will go in now.”

“Eh?” said Hagrid blankly. “No, don’ go! I’ve—I’ve never met another one before!”

“Anuzzer _what_ , precisely?” said Madame Maxime, her tone icy.

Harry could have told Hagrid it was best not to answer; he stood there in the shadows gritting his teeth, hoping against hope he wouldn’t—but of course it was no good.

“Another half-giant, o’ course!” said Hagrid.

“’Ow dare you!” shrieked Madame Maxime. Her voice exploded through the peaceful night air like a foghorn; behind him, Harry heard Fleur and Roger fall out of their rosebush. “I ‘ave nevair been more insulted in my life! ‘Alf-giant? _Moi?_ I ‘ave—I ‘ave big bones!”

She stormed away; great multicolored swarms of fairies rose into the air as she passed, angrily pushing aside bushes. Hagrid was still sitting on the bench, staring after her. It was much too dark to make out his expression. Then, after about a minute, he stood up and strode away, not back to the castle, but off out into the dark grounds in the direction of his cabin.

“C’mon,” Harry said, very quietly to Luna. “Let’s go….”

But Luna didn’t move. She was still staring at the beetle.

Harry frowned and tugged her away bodily; she went without arguing, but she kept turning around to stare at the insect. “What is so fascinating about that bloody bug?” Harry asked through gritted teeth as he half-dragged her down the path.

“I’ve never seen an insect like that before,” Luna said, sounding fascinated, “and I’ve never seen one that was so interested in listening to people. Most normal bugs don’t care what people say, you know. I wonder what sort that one was?”

“I’m not sure you’d know normal if it danced in front of you carrying a sign,” Harry grumbled, but Luna didn’t seem to hear him.

Fleur and Roger Davies had disappeared, probably into a more private clump of bushes. Harry and Luna returned to the Great Hall. He spotted Draco sitting at a table with Pansy, Crabbe, and Goyle, and made a beeline for them.

Draco broke off from whatever he had been saying the moment he saw Harry and turned to him with a frown. Ignoring Luna completely he said, “Where have you _been?”_

“Outside,” said Harry shortly. “Listen—” and he filled the others in on what he had witnessed between Snape and Karkaroff. He thought about telling them about Hagrid and Madame Maxime as well, but only for a moment; Draco was not particularly fond of Hagrid, and so rather than being furious at Madame Maxime for being so rude, he probably would have taken the opportunity to mock Hagrid for being foolish. Besides, Pansy Parkinson was the biggest gossip in their year, and she didn’t need any help finding stories to spread. Harry decided to keep that part of the evening to himself.

Luna, however, piped-up at the end of Harry’s story and said, “Also there was a very strange bug.”

Everyone stared at her. Pansy gave a cold little laugh. “Looking in a mirror, were you?” she asked.

“No,” said Luna, unperturbed, “at a reindeer.”

For a long minute everyone just stared at her. As if in silent, mutual agreement, they all turned away and kept talking as if she hadn’t spoken:

“So how long do you think Snape and Karkaroff have been so chummy?” Harry asked the table at large, careful to avoid catching Luna’s eye.

“Oh—ages, I expect,” said Draco. “I know my parents have known them both forever. Well, longer in the case of Snape; they were in school here together. But Karkaroff they’ve known for years too; I expect Snape could have met him through them, if not before.” He shrugged.

Harry nodded, but frowned; something about that explanation didn’t feel right. He wasn’t sure what, though, so he said instead, “Well…everyone having a good night, are you?”

Crabbe and Goyle nodded at once and launched into an excited discussion about the food and the dancing, which Harry couldn’t hear because at the same time, Pansy was telling him about all the songs he had missed and how much fun they had been to dance to. She kept looking over at Draco and giggling, but Draco was looking up at the staff table, a thoughtful expression on his face.

“I wonder what they were talking about, though,” he mused.

Harry turned to see what Draco was looking at, but there was no sign of either Snape or Karkaroff; most of the teachers were off dancing, talking, or telling-off students. Madame Maxime sat alone at the judges’ table, looking very somber.

Harry spent the rest of the ball talking to his friends at the table, having no inclination to dance. The others got up now and then when a song they particularly liked started, but Luna seemed content to sit in one place and stare out into space, occasionally humming along. Harry tried not to watch Cho and Cedric too much; it gave him a strong desire to kick something. She looked very pretty in her olive green robes and Harry couldn’t help but think how much better she would have looked dancing with him, in his bottle green, than she did with Cedric, who was wearing a sickly sort of brown.

Ludo Bagman tried cozening up to Harry again, but with so many of Harry’s housemates sharing the table, Mr. Bagman didn’t want to make his offers of assistance too plain, so Harry pretended not to understand his hints until he went away again.

Several of his friends from Slytherin dropped by for a chat, or a rest, or a drink in between dances. Harry realized halfway through a conversation with Daphne and her partner, Morag, that he was sitting at what his old primary school classmates would have described as “the popular table,” and couldn’t stop himself from grinning stupidly for several minutes.

Even Hermione came over once, and since she had Viktor Krum in tow none of Harry’s friends objected, not even Pansy Parkinson, although she gave Hermione a very dark look when Krum was looking the other way. Hermione seemed to have quite forgotten her row with Ron Weasley, although Harry suspected she was just pretending. When they got up to return to the dance floor, Pansy muttered, “So much for Durmstrang standards,” sending the rest of the table into fits of laughter—but other than that, it was a surprisingly nice night.

When the Weird Sisters finished playing at midnight, everyone gave them a last, long round of applause and started to wend their way into the entrance hall. Many people were expressing the wish that the ball could have gone on longer and Harry, much to his own surprise, was inclined to agree. When he told Luna goodnight she said, “Oh yes, it was wasn’t it? Thank you so much for bringing me, Harry. I had a very interesting time.” Then she drifted off, bobbing slightly and spinning in place every now and then. Morag, following her housemate up the long staircase, stuffed her nubby hand into her mouth to smother her giggles.

Out in the entrance hall, Harry saw Hermione saying good night to Krum before he went back to the Durmstrang ship. She gave Ron a very cold look as he stomped out of the Great Hall alone, and swept past him up the marble staircase without speaking. Harry and his friends turned in the other direction, taking the stairs that would lead them down to the dungeons. Just as they were turning down the hallway that would lead, after several twists and turns and one hidden tapestry, to the Slytherin common room, Harry heard someone calling him.

It was Cedric Diggory. Harry could see Cho waiting for him at the top of the stairs.

“Yeah?” said Harry coldly as Cedric ran down the stairs toward him.

Cedric looked as though he didn’t want to say whatever it was in front of Harry’s friends, all of whom—with the exception of Crabbe and Goyle, of course—were watching him avidly.

Harry frowned and said, “I’ll meet you back in the common room,” and they reluctantly walked away, Draco pausing several times to crane his neck for a look back at Harry and Cedric.

“Listen…” Cedric lowered his voice as the others disappeared. “I owe you one for telling me about the dragons. You know that golden egg? Does yours wail when you open it?”

“Yeah,” said Harry.

“Well…take a bath, okay?”

“What?”

“Take a bath, and—er—take the egg with you, and—er—just mull things over in the hot water. It’ll help you think…. Trust me.”

Harry stared at him.

“Tell you what,” Cedric said, “use the prefects’ bathroom. Fourth door on the left of that statue of Boris the Bewildered on the fifth floor. Password’s ‘pine fresh.’ Gotta go…want to say good night—”

He grinned at Harry again and hurried back up the stairs to Cho.

Harry walked back to the Slytherin Dungeons alone. That had been extremely strange advice. Why would a bath help him to work out what the wailing egg meant? Was Cedric pulling his leg? Was he trying to make Harry look like a fool, so Cho would like him even more by comparison?

When Harry walked through the stone archway into the common room, he found his friends standing together in front of the windows. He wasn’t sure if they were waiting for him, or just saying good night, and jogged over to join them. “Sorry,” he said, but the little group was already breaking up.

Draco impatiently prised Pansy off his arm and, waving good night to the girls, he and Harry and Crabbe and Goyle trooped downstairs to their own dormitory. “What did Diggory want?” Draco asked at once, even before they had started to remove their dress robes.

Harry shook his head. “I’m not sure,” he said, and launched quickly into the story of the bath and the egg.

When he finished, Draco frowned thoughtfully and said nothing for several minutes. Crabbe filled the silence by suggesting, “Maybe he’s trying to pull a trick on you!”

Harry, who had been wondering that very thing, now paused, uncertain; having Crabbe voice his concerns aloud made them sound foolish. “I dunno,” he said reluctantly, “maybe….”

“Maybe he thinks you smell bad?” Goyle suggested dubiously.

“More likely he’s trying to salve his conscience,” Draco said. “After all, he never would have got past the dragons without you; he probably feels guilty, and figures helping you with the egg will make up for it.”

“Well he might have just told me the answer straight-off,” Harry grumbled. “After all, I didn’t make him play any stupid guessing games about the dragons.”

Draco smirked at Harry in a very sly, knowing way that Harry didn’t like.

“It’s too late to deal with the egg now anyway,” he said quickly. “Let’s just go to sleep. Maybe it’ll make more sense in the morning.”


	21. Rita Skeeter's Scoop

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This section contains several short excerpts from Chapter Twenty-Four, ranging from page 433 to 457 of the American hardcover edition, with a few brief snippets from Chapter Twenty-Three sprinkled in as well.

Everybody got up late on Boxing Day. The Slytherin common room was much quieter than it had been lately, many yawns punctuating the lazy conversations. Pansy Parkinson was the only person who didn’t appear to be tired: she flounced over the moment Harry and his friends climbed up the stairs from their dormitory, attached herself to Draco’s arm, and started gushing about the ball: “Wasn’t last night brilliant? I thought it was lovely. Did you have a good time, Draco? I had a _wonderful_ time, I’m so glad we went together, it was so much more fun than if I’d gone with Bl—well anyway, the whole night was marvelous, and you’re a really good dancer, did you know? I think they should make balls a regular part of the Hogwarts curriculum, that was so much better than some stupid feast in the Great Hall or whatever they normally do for the holidays here….”

Draco, looking amused, let her ramble. The look he shot Harry over Pansy’s head invited him to share the joke.

 Daphne, yawning as she trailed behind her friend, shot Harry a look too. From the way she rolled her eyes, she was much less entertained by Pansy’s prattle.

Harry wondered how much of that had to do with the fact that her own date from the Yule Ball, Morag MacDougal, was in a different house, which made it a lot harder for Daphne to see her than it was for Pansy to flutter around Draco. Harry couldn’t help but wonder what the best tactics were for dating a girl from Ravenclaw Tower, and resolved to keep an eye on Daphne and Morag—just out of curiosity.

When Pansy at last detached herself to go off and gossip with her friends, Harry thought that now he finally had a chance to get Draco back for some of the mockery that he had put Harry through over his search for a date, and for having to resort to going with Luna Lovegood—but Draco just stared at him blankly when Harry tried to tease him about Pansy’s flirting.

“What are you talking about?” said Draco.

“Never mind,” Harry muttered.

He worried that Luna Lovegood might start acting oddly around him now, too—more oddly than she already did, at least—but when Harry and his friends passed a group of third years leaving the library, Luna and Ginny among them, the dreamy-eyed girl didn’t even notice Harry until Ginny elbowed her in the side and pointed to him. Then she said, “Oh, hello Harry,” in her usual vague way, with a distracted little wave. The smile Ginny offered in response to Harry’s greeting was strained, and both girls left quickly—Ginny pulling Luna along as she stared absently out the nearest window—trotting to catch up with their classmates.

Their quick exit didn’t stop Harry’s friends from crowing with laughter and teasing him about Luna Lovegood—except for Daphne, who was too busy digging in her pocket for a note she wanted one of the Ravenclaws to pass to Morag—but since Harry agreed with everything they said about how strange Luna was, the entertainment value of his having taken the dotty Ravenclaw to the ball wore out quickly.

Pansy’s infatuation with Draco remained solid, however, and she continued to fawn over him whenever she got the chance, which meant that Harry, Crabbe, and Goyle ended up spending a lot more time with Pansy—and more often than not, Daphne too—than they ordinarily did.

Draco made no objection to Pansy hanging around, but he did very little to encourage her either, to Harry’s surprise. Ordinarily Draco went out of his way to cultivate any kind of attention, and Harry would have thought that Pansy’s devoted simpering would have delighted him. Instead he seemed to find it hardly worth noticing. From the faces that Daphne made at Harry whenever Pansy’s back was turned, _she_ noticed; the two of them were soon exchanging muttered comments and jibes whenever the others weren’t looking, which didn’t do anything to curb Pansy’s coquettish behavior, but did provide Harry with a pleasant distraction from his other problems.

It was time now to think of the homework they had neglected during the first week of the holidays. Everybody seemed to be feeling rather flat now that Christmas was over—everybody except Harry, that is, who was starting (once again) to feel slightly nervous.

The trouble was that February the twenty-fourth looked a lot closer from this side of Christmas, and he still hadn’t done anything about working out the clue inside the golden egg. He therefore started taking the egg out of his trunk every time he went down to the dormitory, opening it, and listening intently, hoping that this time it would make some sense. He strained to think what the sound reminded him of, apart from thirty musical saws, but he had never heard anything else like it. He closed the egg, shook it vigorously, and opened it again to see if the sound had changed, but it hadn’t. He tried asking the egg questions, shouting over all the wailing, but nothing happened. He even threw the egg across the room—though he hadn’t really expected that to help.

The third time Draco caught him listening to the egg in their dormitory, he snapped, “Haven’t you done the bath thing yet? Did it not work?” and Harry had to admit that he hadn’t tried it yet.

The problem was that his less-than-friendly feelings toward Cedric just now meant that he was keen not to take his help if he could avoid it. In any case, it seemed to him that if Cedric had really wanted to give Harry a hand, he would have been a lot more explicit. He, Harry, had told Cedric exactly what was coming in the first task—and Cedric’s idea of a fair exchange had been to tell Harry to take a bath. Well, he didn’t need that sort of rubbishy help—not from someone who kept walking down corridors hand in hand with Cho, anyway.

“You’re being an idiot,” Draco told him unsympathetically. “What have you got to lose? It’s not like you have to _tell_ anyone where you got the tip, if it works—and if it doesn’t,” he shrugged, “we’ll have Crabbe and Goyle go pound Diggory’s face in. Chang will probably find him a lot less pretty once they’re done, which should cheer you up.”

“I don’t care what Cho thinks about Cedric,” Harry lied through gritted teeth, and Draco laughed.

He stopped pestering Harry about the egg after that—but he did keep giving Harry significant looks and dropping broad hints about how stupid he thought Harry was being. Harry thought about pointing-out how reluctant Draco was to take any suggestions that Hermione Granger offered in Potions Class, but decided against it. If he wasn’t going to take Cedric’s help, he couldn’t afford to lose Draco’s—and he _wasn’t_ going to take Cedric’s help, not unless he had no other choice.

And so the first day of the new term arrived, and Harry set off to lessons, weighed down with books, parchment, and quills as usual, but also with the lurking worry of the egg heavy in his stomach, as though he were carrying that around with him too.

Snow was still thick on the grounds, and the greenhouse windows were covered in condensation so thick that they couldn’t see out of them in Herbology. Nobody was looking forward to Care of Magical Creatures much in this weather, though as Crabbe observed cheerfully, there was always the chance that the skrewts would set Hagrid’s cabin on fire, which would warm them up nicely.

When they arrived at Hagrid’s cabin, however, they found an elderly witch with closely cropped gray hair and a very prominent chin standing before the front door.

“Hurry up, now, the bell rang five minutes ago,” she barked at them as they struggled toward her through the snow.

“What’s going on?” Harry asked. “Where’s Hagrid? Who are you supposed to be?”

“My name is Professor Grubbly-Plank,” she said briskly. “I am your temporary Care of Magical Creatures teacher.”

“Where’s Hagrid?” Harry repeated loudly.

“He is indisposed,” said Professor Grubbly-Plank shortly.

Soft and familiar laughter reached Harry’s ears. He turned; the other Slytherins who had not been in Divination with them that morning were joining the class. Theodore and Pansy both looked particularly gleeful, and neither of them looked surprised to see Professor Grubbly-Plank. Pansy beckoned Draco closer, obviously preparing to fill him in on whatever was going on, but just then the Gryffindors came into view, wading through the snow, and Professor Grubbly-Plank waved for everyone’s attention.

“This way, please,” she said, and she strode off around the paddock where the Beauxbatons horses were shivering. Harry and the others followed her, Harry looking back over his shoulder at Hagrid’s cabin. All the curtains were closed. Was Hagrid in there, alone and ill?

“What’s wrong with Hagrid?” Harry said, hurrying to catch up with Professor Grubbly-Plank.

“Never you mind,” she said as though she thought he was being nosy.

“I do mind, though,” said Harry hotly. “What’s up with him?”

Professor Grubbly-Plank acted as though she couldn’t hear him.

“Yeah, go on teach,” said Seamus Finnigan, trotting to catch up on Professor Grubbly-Plank’s other side, “tell us what’s up. Is he sick?”

Professor Grubbly-Plank shook her head and ignored them both. She led them past the paddock where the huge Beauxbatons horses were standing, huddled against the cold, and toward a tree on the edge of the forest, where a large and beautiful unicorn was tethered.

Many of the girls “ooooohed!” at the sight of the unicorn.

“Oh it’s so beautiful!” whispered Lavender Brown, from Gryffindor. “How did she get it? They’re supposed to be really hard to catch!”

The unicorn was so brightly white it made the snow all around look gray. It was pawing the ground nervously with its golden hooves and throwing back its horned head.

“Boys keep back!” barked Professor Grubbly-Plank, throwing out an arm and catching Harry hard in the chest. “They prefer the woman’s touch, unicorns. Girls to the front, and approach with care, come on, easy does it….”

She and the girls walked slowly forward toward the unicorn, leaving the boys standing near the paddock fence, watching. The moment Professor Grubbly-Plank was out of earshot, Harry turned to Draco.

“What d’you reckon’s wrong with him? You don’t think a skrewt—?”

“It’s much better than that,” Theodore Nott said, a sharp smile on his thin face. “Take a look at this.” He held out a folded page of newsprint and flapped it at Harry and Draco. “That’ll probably change your mind about your dear old Hagrid, Potter….”

He smirked as Harry snatched the page, unfolded it, and read it, with Draco, Ron, and the rest of the Gryffindor boys looking over his shoulder; Crabbe and Goyle had taken one peek at the lengthy column of words and bent down to muck about in the snow instead. It was an article topped with a picture of Hagrid looking extremely shifty.

> **DUMBLEDORE’S GIANT MISTAKE**
> 
> Albus Dumbledore, eccentric headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, has never been afraid to make controversial staff appointments, _writes Rita Skeeter, Special Correspondent._ In September of this year, he hired Alastor “Mad-Eye” Moody, the notoriously jinx-happy ex-Auror, to teach Defense Against the Dark Arts, a decision that caused many raised eyebrows at the Ministry of Magic, given Moody’s well-known habit of attacking anybody who makes a sudden movement in his presence.

“The man’s a menace all right,” Draco muttered darkly.

“Shh!” said Harry, elbowing his friend in the side and continuing to read.

> Mad-Eye Moody, however, looks responsible and kindly when set beside the part-human Dumbledore employs to teach Care of Magical Creatures.
> 
> Rubeus Hagrid, who admits to being expelled from Hogwarts in his third year, has enjoyed the position of gamekeeper at the school ever since, a job secured for him by Dumbledore. Last year, however, Hagrid used his mysterious influence over the headmaster to secure the additional post of Care of Magical Creatures teacher, over the heads of many better-qualified candidates.
> 
> An alarmingly large and ferocious-looking man, Hagrid has been using his newfound authority to terrify the students in his case with a succession of horrific creatures. While Dumbledore turns a blind eye, Hagrid has maimed several pupils during a series of lessons that many admit to being “very frightening.”
> 
> “Well, a boy in our class was hurt pretty badly by a hippogriff,” said Parvati Patil, a four-year student. “The boys are all still keen on Hagrid for some reason, but I’m thinking about dropping the class. It’s just a bit too tense, never knowing what kind of creature you’ll have to deal with next, or who might get hurt!”

“Oh come off it!” Seamus Finnigan exclaimed. “It was just a scratch, what’s Parvati doing going around telling tales on Hagrid for, huh?”

“Shh!” Harry said again, glancing nervously toward Professor Grubbly-Plank, who was now gently coaxing the girls forward one-by-one for a closer look at the unicorn.

> “Sure,” agreed Dean Thomas, another fourth-year student, “the lessons can be a bit rough sometimes, but Madam Pomfrey always has plenty of burn ointment and stuff on hand when we need it.” Too frightened of retaliation, he refused to confirm that Hagrid had intimidated the class into suffering such injuries in silence, but the obvious conclusion—

“Just a minute, now!” Dean Thomas himself cried indignantly. “That wasn’t what I meant at all! She came around asking us if anybody ever got hurt in lessons, and all I said—”

“Shh!” Harry said for the third time, glowering at Thomas until he fell silent, muttering.

> —the obvious conclusion that his students have all been thoroughly cowed by their ferocious teacher at this point seems unavoidable.
> 
> Hagrid has no intention of ceasing his campaign of intimidation, however. In conversation with a _Daily Prophet_ reporter last month, he admitted breeding creatures he has dubbed “Blast-Ended Skrewts,” highly dangerous crosses between manticores and fire-crabs. The creation of new breeds of magical creature is, of course, an activity usually closely observed by the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures. Hagrid, however, considers himself to be above such petty restrictions.
> 
> “I was just having some fun,” he says, before hastily changing the subject.
> 
> As if this were not enough, the _Daily Prophet_ has now unearthed evidence that Hagrid is not—as he has always pretended—a pure-blood wizard. He is not, in fact, even pure human. His mother, we can exclusively reveal, is none other than the giantess Fridwulfa, whose whereabouts are currently unknown.
> 
> Bloodthirsty and brutal, the giants brought themselves to the point of extinction by warring amongst themselves during the last century. The handful that remained joined the ranks of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, and were responsible for some of the worst mass Muggle killings of his reign of terror.

“What?” murmured Draco. “My father never said anything about _giants_ being allied with….”

“Shut-up!” Harry hissed. He tried to stomp on Draco’s foot but missed, catching Neville Longbottom’s toes instead; the round-faced Gryffindor yelped but quickly covered his mouth when Harry turned to glare at him.

“Sorry,” Longbottom whispered. Harry shook his head and bent over the article again.

> While many of the giants who served He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named were killed by Aurors working against the Dark Side, Fridwulfa was not among them. It is possible she escaped to one of the giant communities still existing in foreign mountain ranges. If his antics during Care of Magical Creatures lessons are any guide, however, Fridwulfa’s son appears to have inherited her brutal nature.
> 
> In a bizarre twist, Hagrid is reputed to have developed a close friendship with the boy who brought around You-Know-Who’s fall from power—thereby driving Hagrid’s own mother, like the rest of You-Know-Who’s supporters, into hiding. Perhaps Harry Potter is unaware of the unpleasant truth about his large friend—but Albus Dumbledore surely has a duty to ensure that Harry Potter, along with his fellow students, is warned about the dangers of associating with part-giants.

Harry finished reading and looked up at Draco, whose pointed face was wrinkled in dismay. Ron Weasley’s mouth was hanging open; he wasn’t the only one gaping. “How did she find out?” Harry said, mostly to himself; he hadn’t told anyone else what he and Luna had overheard on the night of the Yule Ball, and he couldn’t imagine that Hagrid had gone around repeating the story. Maybe Madame Maxime…?

“Let me guess,” Dean Thomas said in a low voice, “wizards aren’t too fond of people descended from giants, are they?”

Seamus Finnigan shook his head. “Nah, mate,” he said. “They’re about as keen on giants as they are on werewolves—maybe less, even, given as most werewolves start out as ‘normal’ people and giants are…well, they’re just born that way, you know?”

“Yeah,” Thomas said grimly, “I know what you mean.”

“Who cares?” Harry said. “There’s nothing wrong with Hagrid!”

Draco snorted. “That’s not what this says,” he drawled, pointing at the article that Harry was still clutching in his hands.

He scowled and stuffed it into the pocket of his robes. “There is nothing wrong with Hagrid!” Harry repeated. “Who cares if his mother was a giantess?”

Harry looked around. From the expressions on everybody else’s faces, he knew immediately that he was once again revealing his ignorance of the Wizarding world. Being brought up by the Dursleys, there were many things that wizards took for granted that were revelations to Harry, but these surprises had become fewer with each successive year. Now, however, he could tell that most wizards would care very much.

“Loads of people will,” Neville Longbottom said in a shaky voice. “My Gran, for one….”

“Bother your Gran,” Finnigan muttered, but he did it quietly.

“Blimey, no wonder he keeps it quiet,” Ron said, shaking his head. “I always thought he’d got in the way of a bad Engorgement Charm when he was a kid or something. Didn’t like to mention it….”

“I thought he’d guzzled a bottle of Skele-Gro,” Draco muttered, putting him and Ron in closer agreement on something than they had probably ever been, excepting perhaps Quidditch. Harry wished he was in a mood to appreciate the moment more.

“How do you think this Skeeter person found out?” Finnigan asked, sounding belligerent. “I mean,” he added, glancing sideways at his friend Dean Thomas, “she can’t have tricked any of us into saying anything about that, since none of us knew—right?”

Harry, who had been wondering much the same thing, shook his head. “Maybe she got it from Madame Maxime,” he said heavily. “I know she knows; I overheard Hagrid telling her all about it at the Yule Ball.”

The others rounded on him. “What?” Draco exclaimed. “You _knew?_ You knew he was a half-giant, and you said nothing—?”

“Are you paying attention over there?”

Professor Grubbly-Plank’s voice carried over to the boys; the girls were all clustered around the unicorn now, stroking it. Harry was so wrapped up in thoughts about Hagrid that he barely listened as he turned to stare unseeingly at the unicorn, whose many magical properties Professor Grubbly-Plank was now enumerating in a loud voice, so that the boys could hear too.

“I hope she stays, that woman!” said Parvati Patil when the lesson had ended and they were all heading back to the castle for lunch. “That’s more what I thought Care of Magical Creatures would be like…proper creatures like unicorns, not monsters….”

“Yeah, well, you certainly went out of your way to ensure it, didn’t you?” Harry said angrily as they went up the steps.

“What are you talking about?” Patil asked, her pretty brown face crinkling with confusion.

Harry glared at her, then turned his back and stomped away without answering.

“That was a really good lesson,” said Hermione as they entered the Great Hall. “I didn’t know half the things Professor Grubbly-Plank told us about uni—”

“And what about Hagrid?” Harry demanded.

Hermione blinked at him. “Well—what about him?” she asked, looking just as confused as Parvati Patil, although decidedly less attractive; her hair was bushy again and she was stooping slightly from the weight of all the books she was carrying.

“Look at this!” Harry snarled, and he shoved the _Daily Prophet_ article under Hermione’s nose.

They paused just inside the door while she read through it quickly, then folded the article and handed it back to Harry. Hermione didn’t seem to find the news that Hagrid was a half-giant nearly as shocking as the rest of the Care of Magical Creatures class had.

“Well, I thought he must be,” she said, shrugging. “I knew he couldn’t be pure giant because they’re about twenty feet tall. But honestly, all this hysteria about giants. They can’t _all_ be horrible…. It’s the same sort of prejudice that people have toward werewolves…. It’s just bigotry, isn’t it?”

Ron looked as though he would have liked to reply scathingly, but perhaps he didn’t want another row, because he contented himself with shaking his head disbelievingly while Hermione wasn’t looking.

Draco had no such qualms. “Are you mental?” he exclaimed, loudly enough to draw the attention of several passing Hufflepuffs.

“Yeah,” Goyle said earnestly, “even I know giants are bad news, and everybody knows I’m an idiot.”

“Oh, that—that isn’t…I mean, I wouldn’t say that, no,” Hermione stammered, “you’re not an—not an _idiot_ , just because maybe you don’t get the best _grades_ ….”

“No,” Draco cut her off, “he absolutely is—but not as big of one as you are, if you’re dumb enough to think there’s nothing wrong with giants!”

“Or werewolves, for that matter,” Pansy interjected coldly.

Harry shook his head, but instead of starting that old argument up again, he just said, “You’re all missing the point! How is Rita Skeeter doing this? She knows things she can’t know, and she keeps getting onto the grounds even though Dumbledore has banned her…how is she doing it?”

Nobody had an answer for him.

“We’ve got to go and see Hagrid,” said Harry. “This evening, after History of Magic. Tell him we want him back…you _do_ want him back?” he shot at the others.

“Of course I don’t want him back!” Pansy retorted. “Only a moron would!” She flounced off to the Slytherin table without another word and none of the others looked sad to see her go, not even Draco, although he was shaking his head slowly at Harry.

“What?” Harry demanded.

“You’re kidding, right?” Draco said. “There’s no way they’ll let him go on teaching now. The parents won’t stand for it—having their children taught by a half-giant? This time tomorrow I bet Dumbledore has a hundred Howlers from mummies and daddies worried that he’s going to eat their kiddies.”

Harry felt very cold. He looked around at the others. Crabbe and Goyle would be no help, of course; they always sided with Draco. He turned to Ron and Hermione. “What about you two?” he asked.

Ron shrugged. “Look, Potter, everybody who knows Hagrid will know he’s not dangerous, but everybody else? I mean—they’re just vicious, giants. They like killing, everybody knows that. It’s in their nature, like trolls.”

“What a horrible thing to say,” Hermione exclaimed.

“So you want Hagrid back, then?” Harry said. “Right?”

Hermione looked uncomfortable. “Well…I won’t deny it was nice to have a proper Care of Magical Creatures lesson for a change….”

“Hermione!” Harry cried.

She flushed, quailing under Harry’s furious stare. “Well, it was! Look, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with Professor Hagrid, Harry, and I certainly don’t think there’s anything wrong with being half-giant, but—well, I know he’s your friend, but face the facts: Hagrid just isn’t a very good teacher. And we’re here to _learn_. It’s a school, Harry! Not a—a social club! Yes, Hagrid seems like a very nice person, but—well, he can still be gamekeeper, can’t he? Maybe that would be better for everybody….”

Harry stomped away without speaking.

Everyone at the Slytherin table was discussing the _Daily Prophet_ article by now, and none of them seemed to be on Hagrid’s side. Rather than wasting his time trying to talk his friends around, Harry left alone after dinner and walked out of the Great Hall. Halfway down the stairs outside, he found himself joined by Seamus Finnigan and Dean Thomas.

“Don’t make a big deal out of it, Potter,” Finnigan said, as Harry started to reach for his wand. “We both still think you’re a right proper git—but we heard you were going down to see Hagrid, to convince him to come back to teaching.”

“We want him back too,” Thomas continued, “so we’re coming along.”

“Yeah,” said Finnigan. “This Grubbly-Plank woman seems dead boring and we didn’t sign up to take Care of Magical Creatures so we could coo and simper over cute little unicorns like a bunch of _girls.”_

Harry might have argued, but right now he was ready to take whatever allies he could get—even Dean Thomas and Seamus Finnigan. The three of them went down through the frozen grounds to Hagrid’s cabin. They knocked, and Fang’s booming barks answered.

“Hagrid, it’s me!” Harry shouted, pounding on the door. “Open up!”

Hagrid didn’t answer. They could hear Fang scratching at the door, whining, but it didn’t open. They hammed on it for ten more minutes; Finnigan even went and banged on one of the windows, but there was no response.

“What’s he want to go avoiding us for?” Finnigan complained. “Doesn’t he know we _like_ the fact his lessons are mad? Him being a half-giant—well, that almost makes it better, doesn’t it?”

Dean Thomas nodded, but it seemed that Hagrid did not agree. They didn’t see a sign of him all week. He didn’t appear at the staff table at mealtimes, they didn’t see him going about his gamekeeper duties on the grounds, and Professor Grubbly-Plank continued to take the Care of Magical Creatures classes. Harry was no longer on speaking terms with Hermione, despite her efforts to apologize and explain that she had only been thinking about everyone’s academic future.

There was a Hogsmeade visit halfway through January. Harry supposed he ought to stay and work on the egg, take advantage of the almost-empty common room—or the prefects’ bathroom—but he still had five weeks to work out that egg clue, after all, and that was ages…whereas if he went into Hogsmeade, he might run into Hagrid, and get a chance to persuade him to come back.

He, Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle left the castle together on Saturday and set off through the cold, wet grounds toward the gates. As they passed the Durmstrang ship moored in the lake, they saw Viktor Krum emerge onto the deck, dressed in nothing but swimming trunks. He was very skinny indeed, but apparently a lot tougher than he looked, because he climbed up onto the side of the ship, stretched his arms, and dived, right into the lake.

“He’s mad!” said Harry, staring at Krum’s dark head as it bobbed out into the middle of the lake. “It must be freezing, it’s January!”

“I expect he’s used to colder,” Draco observed, shrugging. “Durmstrang’s located far in the north—compared to a glacier, I bet the Great Lake feels like a tropical island!”

“Maybe he wants to see the squid,” Goyle suggested brightly.

Draco rolled his eyes. “Yes, Goyle,” he said scathingly, “I’m sure he’s swimming around in a deathly-cold lake because he fancies a nice, long chat with the giant squid.”

“Cool,” said Goyle.

Draco shook his head and sighed.

Harry kept his eyes skinned for a sign of Hagrid all the way down the slushy High Street, and suggested a visit to the Three Broomsticks once he had ascertained that Hagrid was not in any of the shops. Crabbe was, as usual, delighted by the idea, and led the way inside.

The pub was as crowded as ever, but one quick look around at all the tables told Harry that Hagrid wasn’t there. Heart sinking, he went up to the bar with Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle, ordered four butterbeers from Madam Rosmerta, and thought gloomily that he might just as well have stayed behind and listened to the egg wailing after all.

“Psst, Harry!” somebody called. “Harry, over here!”

Looking around, Harry spotted Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley at a nearby table. Hermione was waving to him, while Ron glared sulkily into his butterbeer.

Harry glanced at his friends: Draco’s nose was wrinkled with distaste, but he didn’t actually _say_ anything about not wanting to sit with the Gryffindors, and Crabbe and Goyle were both too busy enjoying their butterbeers to care where they sat. Harry led the way over to the table and pulled out the chair next to Hermione, expecting that she wanted to tell him she had finally seen sense about Hagrid.

Instead she said, “Have you worked out your egg yet?” without preamble.

“Er—” said Harry.

“Only Malfoy mentioned in Ancient Runes that you hadn’t gotten there yet, and I’m a bit worried—”

Draco looked outraged. “I didn’t mention it to _you_ ,” he snapped.

“No, well, you were loud enough though, weren’t you?” Hermione said vaguely, her attention still on Harry. “Listen, Harry, the task is only five weeks away. If there’s anything I— _we_ —can do to help…?”

“No, I think I’ve nearly got it,” Harry lied, but Draco laughed before Harry could kick him in the ankle to make him be quiet, so Harry had to say, “All right, maybe not nearly, but I’m working on it.”

“No he’s not,” Draco said smugly. “He could be, but he doesn’t want to, because the idea came from Cedric Diggory.”

Hermione frowned. “Well Harry, that’s just silly. I’m sure Cedric wouldn’t try and sabotage you, and you’ll never know if you don’t at least try it, will you?”

Surprisingly, it was Ron Weasley who spoke-up on Harry’s behalf: “Well Diggory’s a bit of a slick git, isn’t he?” he said. “I’m not sure I’d trust him either, if I were in Harry’s shoes.”

Harry shot Ron a grateful look, but Hermione was shaking her head. “You’re just saying that because you don’t like Cedric on account of him beating Gryffindor at Quidditch,” she said. “Harry, you can’t afford to let petty rivalries like that get under your skin, not if you’re going to win this tournament—or even _survive_ it.”

“Me and Vince are going to pound Diggory’s face in for him, if it turns out he’s trying to pull a fast one,” Goyle said boastfully. Hermione looked unsettled but Ron grinned. “Good on you,” he said, and toasted Goyle with his mug of butterbeer.

“Hey, look who’s here,” Draco whispered suddenly, nudging Harry in the side. They all turned to look, except for Crabbe, who was far more interested in his butterbeer than in anyone else who might be patronizing the Three Broomsticks. Harry leaned sideways to get a better view around Goyle’s wide shoulder and saw Ludo Bagman sitting in a shadowy corner with a bunch of goblins. Bagman was talking very fast in a low voice to the goblins, all of whom had their arms crossed and were looking rather menacing.

It was indeed odd, Harry thought, that Bagman was here at the Three Broomsticks on a weekend when there was no Triwizard event, and therefore no judging to be done. He watched Bagman in the mirror. He was looking strained again, quite as strained as he had that night in the forest before the Dark Mark had appeared. But just then Bagman glanced over his shoulder, saw Harry, and stood up.

“In a moment, in a moment!” Harry heard him say brusquely to the goblins, and Bagman hurried through the pub toward Harry, his boyish grin back in place.

“Harry!” he said. “How are you? Been hoping to run into you! Everything going all right?”

“Fine, thanks,” said Harry.

“Wonder if I could have a quick, private word, Harry?” said Bagman eagerly. “Just a moment of your time, I promise!”

“Er—all right,” said Harry, giving the others a nervous look before standing up.

Bagman led Harry away from the table and along the bar to the end furthest from Madam Rosmerta.

“Well, I just thought I’d congratulate you again on your splendid performance against that Horntail, Harry,” said Bagman. “Really superb.”

“Thanks,” said Harry, but he knew this couldn’t be all that Bagman wanted to say, because he could have congratulated Harry in front of his friends. Bagman didn’t seem in any particular rush to spill the beans, though. Harry saw him glance into the mirror over the bar at the goblins, who were all watching him and Harry in silence through their dark, slanting eyes.

“Absolute nightmare,” said Bagman to Harry in an undertone, noticing Harry watching the goblins too. “Their English isn’t too good…it’s like being back with all the Bulgarians at the Quidditch World Cup…but at least _they_ used sign language another human would recognize. This lot keep gabbling in Gobbledegook…and I only know one word of Gobbledegook. _Bladvak_. It means ‘pickaxe.’ I don’t like to use it in case they think I’m threatening them.”

He gave a short, booming laugh.

“What do they want?” Harry said, noticing how the goblins were still watching Bagman very closely.

“Er—well…” said Bagman, looking suddenly nervous. “They…er…they’re looking for Barty Crouch.”

“Why are they looking for him here?” said Harry. “He’s at the Ministry in London, isn’t he?”

“Er…as a matter of fact, I’ve no idea where he is,” said Bagman. “He’s sort of…stopped coming to work. Been absent for a couple of weeks now. Young Percy, his assistant, says he’s ill. Apparently he’s just been sending instructions in by owl. But would you mind not mentioning that to anyone, Harry? Because Rita Skeeter’s still poking around everywhere she can, and I’m willing to bet she’d work up Barty’s illness into something sinister. Probably say he’s gone missing like Bertha Jorkins.”

That name rang a bell—Harry remembered Sirius telling him about a Bertha Jorkins, who had disappeared in Albania, where You-Know-Who was rumored to be last. “Have you heard anything about Bertha Jorkins?” Harry asked.

“No,” said Bagman, looking strained again. “I’ve got people looking, of course…” (Harry hoped they were all people who ought to have been looking for Sirius) “and it’s all very strange. She definitely _arrived_ in Albania, because she met her second cousin there. And then she left her cousin’s house to go south and see an aunt…and she seems to have vanished without trace en route. Blowed if I can see where she’s got to…she doesn’t seem the type to elope, for instance…but still…. What are we doing talking about goblins and Bertha Jorkins? I really wanted to ask you” —he lowered his voice— “how are you getting on with your golden egg?”

“Er…not bad,” Harry said untruthfully.

Bagman seemed to know he wasn’t being honest.

“Listen, Harry,” he said (still in a very low voice), “I feel very bad about all this…you were thrown into his tournament, you didn’t volunteer for it…and if…” (his voice was so quiet now, Harry had to lean closer to listen) “if I can help at all…a prod in the right direction…I’ve taken a liking to you…the way you got past that dragon!...well, just say the word.”

Harry stared up into Bagman’s round, rosy face and his wide, baby-blue eyes.

“We’re supposed to work out the clues alone, aren’t we?” he said, careful to keep his voice casual and not sound as though he were accusing the Head of the Department of Magical Games and Sports of breaking the rules.

“Well…well, yes,” said Bagman impatiently, “but—come on, Harry—we all want a Hogwarts victory, don’t we?”

“Right, right,” said Harry, “but you being a judge and all, I’m not sure it would be right if…although,” he said, scratching his head, as though inspiration had just struck him, “there is one thing you could do to help me, Mr. Bagman—but I don’t know, it’s probably not in your department….”

“Anything, Harry my boy, anything at all!” Bagman said, puffing out his chest. “I’ve got a fair bit of influence outside Magical Games and Sports, you know!”

“Well,” Harry said slowly, “what would really help me, I think, would be if I could concentrate on the tournament more…if I didn’t have so many distractions….”

“You want me to talk to your teachers, eh?” Bagman guessed. “Convince them to lighten your work-load a bit? Say no more, Harry, say no more—”

“Actually,” Harry said, “what I’d really like is for the Ministry to exonerate Sirius Black.”

Bagman choked. His blue eyes bulged and his cheeks turned red. “You want—what?” he said in a garbled voice.

Harry nodded seriously. “Yeah,” he said. “He’s my god-father, you see.” Harry leaned in closer, as though confiding a great secret; it was his turn to speak quietly, so that Bagman was forced to lean close himself to hear—intrigued in spite of himself— “I happen to know he’s innocent,” Harry whispered, “and the Ministry is looking into evidence right now to reopen his case, but I worry about him, you know? He’s still on the run, Sirius—doesn’t want to risk being tossed back into Azkaban while the Ministry does paperwork—well, he’s spent twelve years in there already, and him an innocent man, of course he wouldn’t want to go back….”

Bagman was shaking his head without taking his eyes off Harry.

“Anyway,” Harry leaned back, speaking in a more normal voice now, “like I said, it’s not really in your department….”

“Er—no, no it isn’t,” Bagman agreed hesitantly, “but I’ll…I’ll see what I can do, Harry….”

Harry beamed. “Thanks, Mr. Bagman,” he said. “I really appreciate it.”

Bagman shifted nervously from foot to foot, but couldn’t say much more as Fred and George Weasley turned up at that point, which Harry decided was his cue to exit. While the Weasley twins had not been plaguing him this year the way they usually did (Harry suspected their sister had yelled at them again; he couldn’t think why else they would suddenly leave off pestering him, especially with him being the fourth champion), he wasn’t going to stand there in front of them and tempt them into testing their resolve—especially when he didn’t have his friends at his side to back him up.

Harry hurried back to his seat, waylaid somewhat by all of the goblins sliding off their chairs and pushing past him; turning, Harry saw Bagman slipping out the front door, apparently no keener to converse with the Weasley twins than was Harry. The goblins all exited after him, and Harry went back to rejoin the others—only Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle were gone.

Harry stopped dead, staring at the half-empty table and the deserted butterbeers sitting atop it. “What—where did they go?” he asked.

Hermione looked uncomfortable. “I don’t know,” she said. “Malfoy just said he had an idea, and they all ran off. Crabbe was, erm, none too happy about leaving before he’d finished his butterbeer, but Malfoy insisted.”

Harry blinked. “They just—just left? Without saying anything to me?”

Hermione gave a tiny nod. “Sorry,” she said.

Harry threw himself back into his chair. “Well—fine then!” he snapped, and grabbed for his butterbeer. Several dollops of foam sloshed over the side of the goblet but Harry was too upset to care.

“What did Bagman want?” asked Ron.

“He offered to help me with the golden egg,” said Harry.

“He shouldn’t be doing that!” said Hermione, looking very shocked. “He’s one of the judges! And anyway, you’ve got that clue from Cedric already, right? So you wouldn’t need his help anyway.”

“Er…well, I don’t want help from Bagman, but I’m not so sure about Cedric’s tip either,” Harry said hesitantly.

 “Well, I don’t think Dumbledore would like it if he knew Bagman was trying to persuade you to cheat!” said Hermione, still looking deeply disapproving. “I hope he’s trying to help Cedric as much!”

Harry shrugged; he hadn’t thought to ask about Cedric.

“Who cares if Diggory’s getting help?” said Ron. Harry, once again, found himself in complete agreement with Ron Weasley; he didn’t know why he had ever found the Gryffindor boy so unlikable….

“Those goblins didn’t look very friendly,” said Hermione, sipping her butterbeer. “What were they doing here?”

“Looking for Crouch, according to Bagman,” said Harry. “He’s still ill. Hasn’t been into work.”

“Maybe Percy’s poisoning him,” said Ron. “My brother—he’s Crouch’s assistant,” he explained unnecessarily to Harry, who had heard all about Percy’s promotion at the Yule Ball, although Ron had no way of knowing that. “Percy probably thinks if Crouch snuffs it he’ll be made Head of the Department of International Magical Cooperation.”

Hermione gave Ron a don’t-joke-about-things-like-that look, and said, “Funny, goblins looking for Mr. Crouch…. They’d normally deal with the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures.”

“Bagman was complaining that they couldn’t really speak English,” said Harry. “Maybe they need an interpreter.”

“Worrying about poor ‘ickle goblins, now, are you?” Ron asked Hermione. “Thinking of starting up S.P.U.G. or something? Society for the Protection of Ugly Goblins?”

Harry laughed.

“Ha, ha, ha,” said Hermione sarcastically. “Goblins don’t need protection. Haven’t you been listening to what Professor Binns has been telling us about goblin rebellions?”

“No,” said Harry and Ron together. Harry couldn’t help grinning at the ginger boy.

“Well, they’re quite capable of dealing with wizards,” said Hermione, taking another sip of butterbeer. “They’re very clever. They’re not like house-elves, who never stick up for themselves.”

“Don’t get her started,” Ron whispered to Harry, who snorted into his butterbeer and shook his head.

Harry spent the rest of the afternoon with Hermione and Ron, surprising himself with how unpleasant it wasn’t. They even jumped to his defense after he shouted at Rita Skeeter in the middle of the Three Broomsticks which, Harry had to admit afterward, had probably not been the best way to go about helping Hagrid out, but which had been extremely satisfying anyway. He was glad Draco hadn’t been there to see him being so foolish, though, and hoped that Rita wouldn’t turn their shouting match into another article.

They walked around Hogsmeade, Ron making jokes with Harry while they waited for Hermione to decide what kind of stationary she wanted, and then up to the Shrieking Shack, where Harry revealed the truth about the ghosts, much to Ron’s shock.

“So it was just Professor Lupin all along?” he asked. He looked like a kid who had just discovered that it was mum and dad eating the cookies he had left out for Santa Clause.

“Yep,” said Harry, “that’s what Sirius told me, anyway.”

“But he might have been lying, right?” Ron said hopefully.

Harry shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said.

Ron frowned. “But Dean and Seamus and I met some ghosts up here once,” he said.

“No you didn’t,” Harry said, shaking his head. “That was just me and a bunch of Fillibuster Fireworks.”

Ron gaped at him. “No way!”

Harry grinned.

Ron sighed and gave the Shrieking Shack a very disappointed look. “Figures,” he muttered.

By the time Harry made his way back to the Slytherin common room, his feet were very cold from slogging through half-frozen mud, but the rest of him felt warm all over. He paused at the stone archway to stamp his feet—it was one thing to track mud through the corridors, which aggravated Mr. Filch, and another to drag it all over his own common room—and heard a familiar voice pontificating from inside: Blaise Zabini.

“—much longer you’re going to keep dallying with that idiot half-blood? It’s pathetic, Malfoy!”

“The only thing that’s pathetic, Zabini, is how you keep yammering on about it.” Draco’s withering drawl was even more familiar, and Harry was sure he recognized the topic under discussion as well: himself. “If you want to be my friend that badly, just get over yourself and admit it.”

“You’re so full of yourself,” Blaise retorted. “This isn’t about you—it’s about Slytherin House.”

Wishing that he had thought to bring his Invisibility Cloak along to Hogsmeade, Harry quickly walked through the archway before it slid closed again, keeping his head ducked low in hopes of not being noticed.

Draco’s pale head was unmistakable, facing away from Harry and rising over the back of one of the long couches in the middle of the room, although his white-blond hair was currently so wet that it was a few shades darker than usual and plastered to his skin. Blaise was standing, leaning over the back of one of the tall chairs that stood diagonally to the couch, but he was leaning down to glare at Draco, and hadn’t spotted Harry yet. He sidled along the wall as discreetly as he could, trying to keep Draco and Blaise within hearing distance without being seen by either of them. He didn’t know where Crabbe or Goyle were, but he didn’t dare look around for them; if he made eye contact, Goyle would probably shout hello before Harry could signal for him to be quiet.

 “And Slytherin House has a Triwizard Champion, thanks to Potter. What’s your point?” The bored tone in Draco’s voice told Harry that this conversation wasn’t fresh.

“A _half-blood_ champion,” Blaise pointed out. “Diggory’s a pure-blood. We _ought_ to be supporting _him_.”

“He’s a Hufflepuff,” said Draco shortly. “You want to go cheer for one of them over a Slytherin, be my guest—but don’t expect many people here to join you.” His dismissive wave took in most of the common room. It was only sparsely populated, most students of third year or higher still being in Hogsmeade; those who were left seemed too occupied with their own endeavors to be paying Draco and Blaise any attention, but Harry knew that appearances could be deceiving. He was sure that at least a dozen ears were pricked right now, drinking in every word. Since he was among them, he wasn’t going to complain; his housemates’ interest in eavesdropping meant that the common room was almost silent aside from Draco and Blaise, which made it easy for Harry to hear. He crouched behind a winged armchair and pretended to be tying the lace of his trainer, in case anyone looked over at him.

“That’s only because standards here have fallen,” Blaise snapped back, “and you’re part of the reason why. You ought to be setting an example, but instead you’re clinging to Potter’s muddy coattails, letting yourself be dragged along in his wake. You were seen in the Three Broomsticks today, you know. Sitting with a blood-traitor and a Mudblood, bold as brass, as if they were people—and dragging those idiots Crabbe and Goyle down with you, to boot. That’s just low, you know they aren’t smart enough to choose good company for themselves. You’re a menace to everything families like ours are supposed to stand for. It _is_ pathetic—and on some level, I think you know I’m right.”

“Whatever helps you sleep at night,” Draco said coolly.

Blaise made a noise of disgust and dropped into the chair across from Draco. He leaned in close before he spoke again, his voice so quiet that Harry had to get up and move closer before he could hear what he was saying: “—nts put you up to this for a good reason, but think about what it’s really costing, would you? I think you’re trading short-term gains for losses that we won’t be able to recover from easily. You’re _normalizing_ it, Malfoy—normalizing a pure-blood marrying a Mudblood, and what kind of example does that set? Eh?”

“I hear your mother’s not as picky about blood-status as you are,” Draco said sharply.

“You leave my mother out of this!” Blaise said, in a much louder voice.

“Then don’t go after my friends,” Draco retorted.

“I know _your_ mother can’t be pleased with you hanging around a half-blood,” Blaise said, sitting back and glowering sullenly. “She was born a Black, after all, and they’re not known for making compromises—not unless you count the one who actually married a Mudblood,” he added with a harsh laugh. “Is that what this is about? You’ve decided to follow in the footsteps of—what was her name, Cardamom? Andrellis? No wait—Andromeda! That was it!”

“Shut-up!” Draco lurched to his feet in a rustle of robes.

“How does your mother feel about your father encouraging her only son to go crawling around in the mud for the sake of his political aspirations, huh? I bet she’s none too keen on the idea, and it had to have started with him…. Is there trouble in paradise at last? Maybe I should let mother know, I’m sure she’d enjoy stopping by to watch the show—”

“I said shut-up!” Draco repeated, his voice shrill. “You stop talking about my parents or I’ll—I’ll—”

“Yeah?” said Blaise, rising to his feet as well. “You’ll what?”

“I’ll see you at midnight in the Trophy Room, is what,” Draco said softly. “Then you can back-up your words for once—or not. Your call.”

“Oh really,” Blaise sneered. “Who’s your second?”

“Harry, of course,” said Draco. Blaise snorted.

“Yeah, right,” he said. “You want to risk relying on someone like that?” Blaise stretched his hands out wide, indicating the nearly-empty common room. “Anyway, I don’t see him here backing you up right now….”

“Look harder,” said Harry, stepping around the chair that had been hiding him. He had one hand in his pocket, holding his wand, although he hadn’t drawn it yet. He’d rather not have to hex Blaise Zabini in the middle of the dungeon—but he remembered Moody’s adage of “constant vigilance,” in case.

Both Blaise and Draco jumped when they saw him, Blaise’s knee knocking against the low table that stood between their seats and making the golden egg on it rattle. Harry looked down, forgetting Moody’s warnings, and said, “Hey—that’s mine!” He glared at Blaise. “What are you doing with that?”

“Ask Malfoy,” Blaise sneered. “He’s the one who’s been fiddling around with your stupid egg all afternoon.” Without another word to either of them, Blaise turned his back and stalked off across the room, head held high.

The egg wasn’t the only thing of Harry’s on the table. Tucked underneath its heavy golden bottom was a very familiar ratty old square of parchment: the Marauder’s Map.

Harry looked at Draco, whose pale cheeks were pink. Harry couldn’t tell if it was from anger at what Blaise had been saying, or embarrassment at being overheard by Harry. “You—you’re back,” Draco stammered. “Good. Great. Um—” He sat back down, smoothing his damp hair back from his forehead, trying and failing to look cool and unruffled. “Have a nice time in Hogsmeade?”

“After you lot abandoned me without so much as a word?” Harry retorted. “Yeah, thanks. What are you doing with the egg? And the Map?”

“Oh, right,” said Draco, “that.” He shook his head, as though pulling himself back together. “Well actually, I’ve just been solving your clue for you. Did what Diggory suggested, and…well….” He smirked.

Forgetting the ugly scene he had just witnessed, Harry dropped into the seat opposite his friend. “You _solved it?”_ he repeated. “Well—go on then! What’s the answer?”

Draco shook his head. “You really ought to see it for yourself,” he said loftily. “No—no, I’m not going to tell you. Where would be the fun in that?”

“Come on,” Harry pleaded, “it’s my egg, isn’t it? My clue? If you’re going to go around poking in my things, the least you can do is tell me what you found out!”

Draco shook his head again, his expression now unbearably smug. “Nope,” he said. “You need to do it for yourself, I think. Besides, what happens if they ask you for details, and you can’t answer because I left out something I thought was irrelevant? They’d know you were cheating, then.”

Harry scowled but couldn’t argue. “Fine,” he said, “I’ll do it myself. But I think you’re being a prat.”

Draco laughed at him. “Good,” he said, “it’s about time—but not tonight. We might have an engagement.”

Harry shook his head. “I can’t believe you challenged Blaise to a duel,” he said.

Draco’s pleased expression darkened. “He had it coming,” he said shortly.

Harry couldn’t argue with that, either.


	22. The Egg and the Eye

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This section glosses over the opening segment of Chapter Twenty-Five, skipping and summarizing most of the scene with Harry and the egg in the prefect’s bathroom. For the full details of the event, please refer to the canon source. We pick up with the story following Harry’s exit from the bathroom on page 466 of the American hardcover edition, and the remaining portion of this section includes several excerpts from the latter half of the chapter.

They waited in the trophy room until quarter of one. Harry kept stealing glances at his watch and jumped at every noise, certain that each foreboded a teacher on the brink of catching them out after hours. Draco was even twitchier, fidgeting with his wand and pacing the room anxiously, which Harry ascribed to the fact that they had left both Crabbe and Goyle behind; the invisibility cloak was not long enough to cover even three of them, let alone all four.

It wasn’t until he overheard Draco muttering that at least there was no way for Mad-Eye Moody to sneak up on anyone, not with that clumsy wooden leg of his, that it occurred to Harry that Draco was just as nervous about being caught by a teacher as he was—although probably not over the threat of detention.

Harry had been on Filch the caretaker’s list of least favorite people (which was saying a lot, as Filch seemed to passionately hate _every_ student at Hogwarts) ever since he tripped over Filch’s cat, Mrs. Norris, during his second year. Harry had no desire to be caught out of bed in the middle of the night by Argus Filch. Finally resigned to the idea of taking Cedric’s advice for dealing with the egg, he didn’t want to have his trip to the prefect’s bathroom derailed by evening punishment assignments.

He wondered if he’d be able to talk his way out of getting in trouble if he said he needed his evenings free for the Triwizard Tournament. It would depend on the teacher, he knew; while he wasn’t worried about Professor Snape for once, being that he was here with Draco, but Professor McGonagall was a very different matter—and like Draco, he didn’t want to even think about what Mad-Eye Moody might do if he was the one who caught them.

A distant clatter of a suit of armor toppling made Harry start so badly he dropped his wand. He scrambled to retrieve it, blushing horribly, and looked at his watch again as an excuse to avoid looking at Draco.

“I don’t think Blaise is coming,” he blurted. “Why don’t we just head back?”

“All right,” said Draco immediately, surprising Harry. He had expected the other boy to argue, but Draco practically bolted for the door. Harry barely managed to get the cloak back over both their heads before he opened it, leading them both forward into the dim hallway.

They walked fast on their way back to the dungeon, Harry with the Marauder’s Map clutched in one hand and Draco with his wand held out white-knuckled before him. It wasn’t until they reached the stairs that would return them to the dungeon that Draco relaxed enough to start offering scathing comments about Blaise’s cowardice in not turning up, although he privately seemed to be just as glad as Harry not to have to fight their dorm-mate.

 “It’s not like he actually _agreed_ to the duel,” Harry pointed out as they sneaked back into the common room.

“He just knows there’s no chance he would win,” Draco sneered.

Harry was less certain the outcome would have been so forgone a conclusion, but he prudently kept his doubts to himself.

At any rate, Blaise choosing to ignore him and Draco over the next few days gave Harry plenty of time to plan his next nighttime excursion. When Thursday night came around, he felt as ready as could be.

 “So,” said Draco, “you’ve got the Cloak, and the Map, and you remember the password—right?”

“Pine fresh,” Harry said obediently.

“Good,” said Draco. “Here’s the egg. Hang on, I’ll go open the door, and then you follow me out….”

Harry nodded and pulled the hood of his dad’s old Invisibility Cloak over his head. “What are you going to say you’re doing if someone asks why you’re leaving the common room this late?” he asked.

“Going to see Professor Snape, of course,” said Draco, as though Harry had just asked something incredibly stupid.

Harry nodded again, although Draco couldn’t see it this time. It was a good answer; none of their fellow Slytherins, not even the prefects, would interfere with Draco wanting to talk to their Head of House. He could wait a few minutes around the corner, return to the common room, and if anyone asked why he had come back so quickly just say that Snape hadn’t been in his office. Even if someone caught him in the corridors, he could _actually_ go to Snape and make up some story for why he’d needed to talk to him after hours.

_Probably just tell him he’s fussing about his latest potions grade,_ Harry thought with a smirk. He knew that Draco was more of a swot than his friend liked to let on, especially when it came to his favorite class. Even Snape, who seemed to be able to smell lies, was unlikely to find that excuse suspicious.

After checking to make sure that both he and everything he was carrying were covered by the cloak, Harry followed Draco out through the secret archway. “Thanks,” he whispered, and headed for the stairs.

It was awkward moving under the Cloak tonight, because Harry had the heavy egg under one arm and the map held in front of his nose with the other. However, the moonlit corridors were empty and silent, and by checking the map at strategic intervals, Harry was able to ensure that he wouldn’t run into anyone he wanted to avoid. He made it to the prefects’ bathroom without incident though, and—unless one counted nosiness from Moaning Myrtle, the ghost who usually haunted the girls’ toilet on the floor above the Great Hall—he figured out the secret of the egg just as easily.

He bid a distracted farewell to Myrtle, thinking about the merpeople and how he was going to breathe underwater for an hour—there was a thought, a distant one, tickling at the back of his mind, but every time Harry tried to concentrate on it, the idea slipped away—and made sure that the Invisibility Cloak was once more securely concealing him before he left the prefects’ bathroom.

Out in the dark corridor, Harry examined the Marauder’s Map to check that the coast was still clear. Yes, the dots belonging to Filch and his cat, Mrs. Norris, were safely in their office…nothing else seemed to be moving apart from Peeves, though he was bouncing around the trophy room on the floor above…. Harry had taken his first step back to the Slytherin Dungeon when something else on the map caught his eye…something distinctly odd.

Peeves was _not_ the only thing that was moving. A single dot was flitting around a room in the bottom left-hand corner—Snape’s office. But the dot wasn’t labeled “Severus Snape”…it was Bartemius Crouch.

Harry stared at the dot. Mr. Crouch was supposed to be too ill to go to work or to come to the Yule Ball—so what was he doing, sneaking into Hogwarts at one o’clock in the morning? Harry watched closely as the dot moved around and around the room, pausing here and there….

Harry hesitated, thinking…and then his curiosity got the better of him. He had to return to the dungeons to get back to his common room anyway; it wouldn’t be more than a few minutes detour to pass by Snape’s office on the way. He was going to see what Crouch was up to.

Harry walked down the stairs as quietly as possible, though the faces in some of the portraits still turned curiously at the squeak of a floorboard, the rustle of his pajamas. He crept along the corridor below, pushed aside a tapestry about halfway along, and proceeded down a narrower staircase, a shortcut that would take him down two floors. He kept glancing down at the map, wondering… It just didn’t seem in character, somehow, for correct, law-abiding Mr. Crouch to be sneaking around somebody else’s office this late at night….

And then, halfway down the staircase, not thinking about what he was doing, not concentrating on anything but the peculiar behavior of Mr. Crouch, Harry’s leg suddenly sank right through the trick step that Crabbe and Goyle were always trying to shove one another into. He gave an ungainly wobble, and the golden egg, still damp from the bath, slipped from under his arm. He lurched forward to try and catch it, but too late; the egg fell down the long staircase with a bang as loud as a bass drum on every step—the Invisibility Cloak slipped—Harry snatched at it, and the Marauder’s Map fluttered out of his hand and slid down six stairs, where, sunk in the step to above his knee, he couldn’t reach it.

The golden egg fell through the tapestry at the bottom of the staircase, burst open, and began wailing loudly in the corridor below. Harry pulled out his wand and struggled to touch the Marauders’ Map, to wipe it blank, but it was too far away to reach—

Pulling the Cloak back over himself, Harry straightened up, listening hard with his eyes screwed up with fear…and almost immediately—

“PEEVES!”

It was the unmistakable hunting cry of Filch the caretaker. Harry could hear his rapid, shuffling footsteps coming nearer and nearer, his wheezy voice raised in fury.

“What’s the racket? Wake up the whole castle, will you? I’ll have you, Peeves, I’ll have you, you’ll…and what is this?”

Filch’s footsteps halted; there was a clink of metal on metal and the wailing stopped—Filch had picked up the egg and closed it. Harry stood very still, one leg still jammed tightly in the magical step, listening. Any moment now, Filch was going to pull aside the tapestry, expecting to see Peeves…and there would be no Peeves…but if he came up the stairs, he would spot the Marauder’s Map…and Invisibility Cloak or not, the map would show “Harry Potter” standing exactly where he was.

Harry debated drawing his wand and Stunning Filch the moment he lifted the tapestry; he had never successfully Stunned anyone, although he had come close to casting the spell on Professor Flitwick last year…he knew the incantation…but if the spell wore-off before Harry got his leg out of the step, and he was caught, he would be in much worse trouble for attacking Filch than he would be just for wandering the castle after hours….

“Egg?” Filch said quietly at the foot of the stairs. “My sweet!”—Mrs. Norris was obviously with him—“This is a Triwizard clue! This belongs to a school champion!”

Harry felt sick; his heart was hammering very fast—

“PEEVES!” Filch roared gleefully. “You’ve been stealing!”

He ripped back the tapestry below, and Harry saw his horrible, pouchy face and bulging, pale eyes staring up the dark and (to Filch) deserted staircase.

“Hiding, are you?” he said softly. “I’m coming to get you, Peeves…. You’ve gone and stolen a Triwizard clue, Peeves…. Dumbledore’ll have you out of here for this, you filthy, pilfering poltergeist….”

Filch started to climb the stairs, his scrawny, dust-colored cat at his heels. Mrs. Norris’s lamp-like eyes, so very like her master’s, were fixed directly upon Harry. He had had occasion before now to wonder whether the Invisibility Cloak worked on cats…. Sick with apprehension, he watched Filch drawing nearer and nearer in his old flannel dressing gown—he tried desperately to pull his trapped leg free, but it merely sank a few more inches—any second now, Filch was going to spot the map or walk right into him. Harry reached into his pocket for his wand—

“Filch? What’s going on?”

Filch stopped a few steps below Harry and turned. At the foot of the stairs stood the one person who might be able to get Harry out of this disaster, although not without some harsh reprimands of his own: Professor Severus Snape. He was wearing a long grey nightshirt and he looked livid.

“It’s Peeves, Professor,” Filch whispered malevolently. “He threw this egg down the stairs.”

Professor Snape climbed up the stairs quickly and stopped beside Filch. Harry gritted his teeth, convinced his loudly thumping heart would give him away at any second…. He tried to decide whether it would be better to pull the Cloak off and confess everything to Snape straight off, or to keep quiet and hold out hope that they would both go away without catching him….

“Peeves?” said Snape softly, staring at the egg in Filch’s hands. “But Peeves couldn’t get into my office….”

“This egg was in your office, Professor?”

“Of course not,” Snape snapped. “I heard banging and wailing—”

“Yes, Professor, that was the egg—”

“—I was coming to investigate—”

“—Peeves threw it, Professor—”

“—and when I passed my office, I saw that the torches were lit and a cupboard door was ajar! Somebody has been searching it!”

“But Peeves couldn’t—”

“I know he couldn’t, Filch!” Snape snapped again. “I seal my office with a spell none but a wizard could break!” Harry’s stomach gave a guilty lurch as he remembered breaking into that very office with Draco last year. He hoped Snape wasn’t going to blame him this time—but since Harry’s Firebolt wasn’t being kept there, he had no reason to go meddling in Snape’s office…

Snape looked up the stairs, straight through Harry, and then down into the corridor below. “I want you to come and help me search for the intruder, Filch.”

“I—yes, Professor—but—”

Filch looked yearningly up the stairs, right through Harry, who could see that he was very reluctant to forgo the chance of cornering Peeves. _Go_ , Harry pleaded with him silently, wishing now that Moody had taught them how to do more than just resist the Imperius Curse, _go with Snape…go…_ Mrs. Norris was peering around Filch’s legs…. Harry had the distinct impression that she could smell him…. Why had he filled that bath with so much perfumed foam?

“The thing is, Professor,” said Filch plaintively, “the headmaster will have to listen to me this time. Peeves has been stealing from a student, it might be my chance to get him thrown out of the castle once and for all—”

“Filch, I don’t give a damn about that wretched poltergeist; it’s my office that’s—”

_Clunk. Clunk. Clunk._

Snape stopped talking very abruptly. He and Filch both looked down at the foot of the stairs. Harry saw Mad-Eye Moody limp into sight through the narrow gap between their heads. Moody was wearing his old traveling cloak over his nightshirt and leaning on his staff as usual.

“Pajama party, is it?” he growled up the stairs.

“Professor Snape and I heard noises, Professor,” said Filch at once. “Peeves the Poltergeist, throwing things around as usual—and then Professor Snape discovered that someone had broken into his off—”

“Shut up!” Snape hissed to Filch.

Moody took a step closer to the foot of the stairs. Harry saw Moody’s magical eye travel over Snape, and then, unmistakably, onto himself.

Harry’s heart gave a horrible jolt. _Moody could see through Invisibility Cloaks_ …he alone could see the full strangeness of the scene: Snape in his nightshirt, Filch clutching the egg, and he, Harry, trapped in the stairs behind them. Moody’s lopsided gash of a mouth opened in surprise. For a few seconds, he and Harry stared straight into each other’s eyes. Then Moody closed his mouth and turned his blue eye upon Snape again.

“Did I hear that correctly, Snape?” he asked slowly. “Someone broke into your office?”

Harry gaped; was Moody really pretending not to have seen him?

“It is unimportant,” said Snape coldly.

“On the contrary,” growled Moody, “it is very important. Who’d want to break into your office?”

“A student, I daresay,” said Professor Snape. Harry could see a vein flickering horribly on Snape’s greasy temple. “It has happened before. Potion ingredients have gone missing from my private store cupboard…students attempting illicit mixtures, no doubt….”

“Reckon they were after potion ingredients, eh?” said Moody. “Not hiding anything else in your office, are you?”

Harry saw the edge of Snape’s sallow face turn a nasty brick color, the vein in his temple pulsing more rapidly.

“You know I’m hiding nothing, Moody,” he said in a soft and dangerous voice, “as you’ve searched my office pretty thoroughly yourself.”

Moody’s face twisted into a smile. “Auror’s privilege, Snape. Dumbledore told me to keep an eye—”

“Dumbledore happens to trust me,” said Snape through clenched teeth. “I refuse to believe that he gave you orders to search my office!”

“’Course Dumbledore trusts you,” growled Moody. “He’s a trusting man, isn’t he? Believes in second chances. But me—I say there are spots that don’t come off, Snape. Spots that never come off, d’you know what I mean?”

Professor Snape suddenly did something very strange. He seized his left forearm convulsively with his right hand, as though something on it had hurt him.

Moody laughed. “Get back to bed, Snape.”

“You don’t have the authority to send me anywhere!” Snape hissed, letting go of his arm as though angry with himself. “I have as much right to prowl this school after dark as you do!”

“Prowl away,” said Moody, but his voice was full of menace. “I look forward to meeting you in a dark corridor some time…. You’ve dropped something, by the way….”

With a stab of horror, Harry saw Moody point at the Marauder’s Map, still lying on the staircase six steps below him. As Snape and Filch both turned to look at it, Harry threw caution to the winds; he raised his arms under the Cloak and waved furiously at Moody to attract his attention, mouthing “It’s mine! _Mine!”_

Snape had reached for it, a horrible expression of dawning comprehension on his face—

_“Accio Parchment!”_

The map flew up into the air, slipped through Snape’s outstretched fingers, and soared down the stairs into Moody’s hand.

“My mistake,” Moody said calmly. “It’s mine—must’ve dropped it earlier—”

 But Professor Snape’s black eyes were darting from the egg in Filch’s arms to the map in Moody’s hand, and Harry could tell he was putting two and two together, as only Snape could….

“Potter,” he said quietly.

“What’s that?” said Moody calmly, folding up the map and pocketing it.

“Potter,” Snape repeated, and he actually turned his head and stared right at the place where Harry was, as though he could suddenly see him. His mouth worked, as though he would like to speak, but his sharp gaze flicked back over his shoulder to rest on Moody for a moment, and he swallowed whatever words he had been about to utter. After a moment he forced an unpleasant smile and said, “I believe that one of my students is out of bed. If you will both excuse me, I have school duties to attend to….”

Snape stretched out his hands like a blind man and began to move up the stairs; Harry could have sworn his over-large nostrils were dilating, trying to sniff Harry out. He wondered if Snape would let him off lightly if he told him who had been searching his office—but doing that would mean admitting how the Marauder’s Map worked, and Snape would surely confiscate it then—and there was the inevitable detention to worry about, too...but surely getting caught by Snape would be better than waiting until he was alone with Moody? Then again, Moody had prevented Snape from discovering the Marauder’s Map….

 Trapped by indecision as much as he was by the trick step holding his leg, Harry leaned backward, trying to avoid Snape’s fingertips, but any moment now—

“There’s nothing there, Snape!” barked Moody, “but I’ll be happy to tell the headmaster how quickly your mind jumped to Harry Potter!”

“Meaning what?” Snape turned again to look at Moody, his hands still outstretched, inches from Harry’s chest.

“Meaning that Dumbledore’s very interested to know who’s got it in for that boy!” said Moody, limping nearer still to the foot of the stairs. “And so am I, Snape…very interested….” The torchlight flickered across his mangled face, so that the scars, and the chunk missing from his nose, looked deeper and darker than ever.

Snape was looking down at Moody, and Harry couldn’t see the expression on his face. For a moment, nobody moved or said anything. Then Snape slowly lowered his hands.

“I merely thought,” said Snape, in a voice of silky calm, “that if Potter was wandering around after hours again…it’s an unfortunate habit of his…he should be stopped. For his own safety.”

“Ah, I see,” said Moody softly. “Got Potter’s best interests at heart, have you?”

“As I do all of the students in Slytherin House, who are my special responsibility,” Professor Snape said.

“And no more than that, eh?” said Moody.

“No more than that,” Snape said frostily.

 “Well then,” said Moody, jerking a thumb over his shoulder, “if you’re so sure he’s out there, why don’t you go see if you can find him? For Potter’s own safety, of course.”

There was a pause. Snape and Moody were still staring at each other. Mrs. Norris gave a loud meow, still peering around Filch’s legs, looking for the source of Harry’s bubble-bath smell.

Without a word to either of them, Snape suddenly broke the stand-off and swept away down the hallway, shouldering Filch out of his way. Moody he was careful to give a wide berth, but the look he shot at the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher as he passed was dark enough to make Harry shudder, even several feet away.

“Hmph,” said Moody, watching him go. Only when Snape was out of sight did he turn back around to face the caretaker once more. “Now, Filch, if you’ll just give me that egg—”

“No!” said Filch, clutching the egg as though it were his firstborn son. “Professor Moody, this is evidence of Peeves’ treachery!”

“It’s the property of the champion he stole it from,” said Moody. “Hand it over, now.”

With an expression reminiscent of Goyle when commanded to share his candy, Filch did as he was told. Then he made a chirruping noise to Mrs. Norris, who stared blankly at Harry for a few more seconds before turning and following her master. They soon disappeared from view, Filch muttering to Mrs. Norris. “Never mind, my sweet…we’ll see Dumbledore in the morning…tell him what Peeves was up to….”

A door slammed. Harry was left staring down at Moody, who placed his staff on the bottommost stair and started to climb laboriously toward him, a dull _clunk_ on every other step. Harry was suddenly struck by the thought that he had made a terrible mistake. Maybe it wasn’t too late for him to shout for Professor Snape to come back…

Moody came to a stop on the step in front of Harry. “Close shave, Potter,” he muttered.

“Yeah…I—er…thanks,” said Harry weakly.

“What is this thing?” said Moody, drawing the Marauder’s Map out of his pocket and unfolding it.

“Map of Hogwarts,” said Harry, hoping Moody was going to pull him out of the staircase soon; his leg was really hurting him.

“Merlin’s beard,” Moody whispered, staring at the map, his magical eye going haywire. “This…this is some map, Potter!”

“Yeah, it’s…quite useful,” Harry said. His eyes were starting to water from the pain. “Er—Professor Moody, d’you think you could help me—?”

“What? Oh! Yes…yes, of course…”

Moody took hold of Harry’s arms and pulled; Harry’s leg came free of the trick step, and he climbed onto the one above it. Moody was still gazing at the map.

“Potter…” he said slowly, “you didn’t happen, by any chance, to see who broke into Snape’s office, did you? On this map, I mean?”

“Er…yeah, I did…” Harry admitted. “It was Mr. Crouch.”

Moody’s magical eye whizzed over the entire surface of the map. He looked suddenly alarmed.

“Crouch?” he said. “You’re—you’re sure, Potter?”

“Positive,” said Harry.

“Well, he’s not here anymore,” said Moody, his eye still whizzing over the map. “Crouch…that’s very—very interesting….”

He said nothing for almost a minute, still staring at the map. Harry could tell that this news meant something to Moody and he very much wanted to know what it was. He wondered whether he dared ask. Moody scared him more than any other professor Harry had ever had…yet Moody had just helped him avoid an awful lot of trouble, even if it was likely just so that he could bestow a more interesting punishment than what was permitted under school rules…but if he was going to be subjected to some horrible spell already, he might as well go for broke….

“Er…Professor Moody…why d’you reckon Mr. Crouch wanted to look around Snape’s office?”

Moody’s magical eye left the map and fixed, quivering, upon Harry. It was a penetrating glare, and Harry had the impression that Moody was sizing him up, wondering whether to answer or not, or how much to tell him.

“Put it this way, Potter,” Moody muttered finally, “they say old Mad-Eye’s obsessed with catching Dark wizards…but I’m nothing— _nothing_ —compared to Barty Crouch.”

“I suppose—er—I should probably tell Professor Snape who it was, shouldn’t I?” Harry asked, although admitting to Snape that he had had in fact been wandering the corridors was the last thing Harry felt like doing. “But it can wait until tomorrow at least, can’t it?” Maybe if Harry was lucky, Snape would be too upset with Mr. Crouch to ask questions, like how Harry had known who was in his office, and what he’d been doing out after hours….

“No,” Moody said quickly, making Harry jump. “No,” he repeated more calmly, patting Harry on the shoulder, “no I don’t think that’s a good idea at all, Potter. I’ll take care of informing Snape. You keep your mouth shut. No sense you getting yourself in trouble, is there?”

Harry sighed heavily with relief. “Thanks, professor,” he said fervently.

Moody grunted. He continued to stare at the map. Harry was burning to know more.

“Professor Moody?” he said again. “D’you think…could this have anything to do with…maybe Mr. Crouch thinks there’s something going on….”

“Like what?” said Moody sharply.

Harry wondered how much he dare say. The Ministry knew that Harry believed Sirius was innocent, of course, and it was no secret that Lucius Malfoy was lobbying the government on Sirius’s behalf at Harry’s request, but he knew it was important to downplay how much direct contact he had with Sirius until he was officially exonerated, to keep from accidentally incriminating himself as an accessory. Mr. Malfoy had been very clear about that in his instructions to both Harry and Draco.

“I don’t know,” Harry muttered, “odd stuff’s been happening lately, hasn’t it? It’s been in the _Daily Prophet_ …the Dark Mark at the World Cup, and the Death Eaters and everything….”

Both of Moody’s mismatched eyes widened.

“You’re a sharp boy, Potter,” he said. His magical eye roved back to the Marauder’s Map. “Crouch could be thinking along those lines,” he said slowly. “Very possible…there have been some funny rumors flying around lately—helped along by Rita Skeeter, of course. It’s making a lot of people nervous, I reckon.” A grim smile twisted his lopsided mouth. “Oh if there’s one thing I hate,” he muttered, more to himself than to Harry, and his magical eye was fixed on the left-hand corner of the map, “it’s a Death Eater who walked free….”

Harry stared at him. Could Moody possibly mean what Harry thought he meant?

“And now I want to ask _you_ a question, Potter,” said Moody in a more businesslike tone.

Harry’s heart sank; he had thought this was coming. “You’re going to Transfigure me into something, aren’t you?” he said heavily. At least there was nobody else here to bear witness to Harry’s imminent humiliation.

“What?” Moody looked startled, then he let out a bark of laughter. “No! No, of course not—I’ve learned my lesson. Shouldn’t have done that in the first place, but—well, I got carried away, didn’t I?” He shook his grizzled head. “No, I’m not going to turn you into anything, and you can tell your friend Malfoy he can stop twitching every time I look at him; I’m not going to turn him into anything else either.” Moody seemed to be struggling with himself over something; after a moment he grumbled, “In fact, you can give him my apologies the next time you see him.” He cleared his throat noisily, then waved the Marauder’s Map in front of Harry and said, “No, I just wondered if I can borrow this?”

“Oh!” said Harry.

He was very fond of his map, but on the other hand, he was extremely relieved that Moody wasn’t going to do anything nasty—in fact, he wasn’t even asking where Harry had gotten the map—and there was no doubt that he owed Moody a favor.

“Yeah, okay.”

“Good boy,” growled Moody. “I can make good use of this…this might be _exactly_ what I’ve been looking for…. Right, bed, Potter, come on, now….”

They walked down the staircase together, Moody still examining the map as though it was a treasure the like of which he’d never seen before. They walked in silence to the entrance hall, where Harry would begin the climb down to the dungeons and Moody could head—well, to wherever it was he went when he prowled the school after dark. Harry wondered if he was going to stop by Snape’s office and resolved to take a different route to his common room, one that would go nowhere near the Potions Master’s rooms.

Just as Harry was about to start down the first of the dungeon staircases, Moody stopped and looked up at Harry.

“You ever thought of a career as an Auror, Potter?”

“No,” said Harry, taken aback.

“You want to consider it,” said Moody, nodding and looking at Harry thoughtfully. “Yes, indeed…and incidentally…I’m guessing you weren’t just taking that egg for a walk tonight?”

“Er—no,” said Harry, grinning. “I’ve been working out the clue.”

Moody winked at him, his magical eye going haywire again.

“Nothing like a nighttime stroll to give you ideas, Potter…. See you in the morning….”

He turned and trudged off back up the Grand Staircase, staring down at the Marauder’s Map again, his wooden leg clunking softly on the stones.

Harry walked slowly back to the Slytherin Dungeon, lost in thought about Snape, and Crouch, and what it all meant…. Why was Crouch pretending to be ill, if he could manage to get to Hogwarts when he wanted to? What did he think Snape was concealing in his office?

And Moody thought he, Harry, ought to be an Auror! Interesting idea…but somehow, Harry thought, as he got quietly into his four-poster ten minutes later, the egg and the Cloak now safely back in his trunk, he thought he’d like to check how scarred the rest of them were before he chose it as a career.


	23. The Second Task

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This section contains a number of sporadic excerpts from Chapter Twenty-Six, reaching from page 479 to 508 of the American hardcover edition, particularly in the latter part of the section, although parts of the second task have been abbreviated. It also contains two sentences lifted from the fifth chapter of _Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets_.
> 
> One additional note: the opening scene of this section takes place in Charms Class, which is the same setting as that used in canon. I have chosen to use Charms as well because, in canon, it seems like Harry’s Friday morning schedule (as a Gryffindor) actually starts with History of Magic first, then Charms; thus having the Slytherins take Charms first thing on Friday fits within the canonical schedule perfectly (and was conveniently the period I had already scheduled their Charms lessons for anyway, during an earlier part of the story). Why Harry, Ron, and Hermione waited until their second period of the day to discuss the previous night’s events in canon, I have no idea—but perhaps they just didn’t want to risk anyone overhearing them in the much quieter, duller environment of the History of Magic classroom. At any rate, I promise that this time around I have kept a consistent schedule of classes throughout, unlike in the last volume when my computer crisis threw everything for a loop!

Harry didn’t want to risk telling his friends what he had learned last night at breakfast, where anyone—including the Durmstrang students—could eavesdrop on him. He shushed them (mostly he shushed Draco, because Crabbe and Goyle rarely showed interest in anything else when there was food around) several times before they finally gave up asking. Once in class, however, Harry pulled all three of them to a table in the back of the room as soon as Professor Flitwick dispersed the students to work on their Banishing Charms.

Owing to the potential for nasty accidents when objects kept flying across the room, Professor Flitwick had given each student a stack of cushions on which to practice, the theory being that these wouldn’t hurt anyone if they went off target. It was a good theory, but it wasn’t working very well. Some of the students didn’t have very good aim, and so occasionally they sent much heavier objects flying across the room—Professor Flitwick, for instance, although Harry suspected that Crabbe was probably doing that on purpose from the way he kept sniggering.

“Would you leave off?” Harry hissed to him as Professor Flitwick went whizzing resignedly past them, landing on top of a large cabinet. “I’m trying to tell you about Snape and Moody….”

This class was an ideal cover for a private conversation, as everyone was having far too much fun to pay them any attention. Harry had been recounting his adventures of the previous night in whispered installments for the last half hour.

“So Dumbledore’s got Moody poking around on his behalf,” Draco said darkly as he banished a cushion with a sweep of his wand (it soared into the air and narrowly missed clipping Pansy’s and Daphne’s heads, making both girls shriek and duck). “Do you think he’s got him sneaking around any of the other teachers, or just Professor Snape?”

“Karkaroff too,” Harry reminded him, “and I don’t know if Dumbledore actually asked him to do it or not—Snape didn’t seem to think it was something Dumbledore would want done.” He waved his wand without paying much attention, so that his cushion did an odd sort of belly flop off the desk.”Moody said Dumbledore only lets Snape stay here because he’s giving him a second chance or something….”

“Hey,” Goyle said suddenly, sending a cushion spiraling through the air in a wobbly arc before hitting the wall with a breathy thump, like a fart being released, “maybe Moody thinks _Snape_ put your name in the Goblet of Fire!”

“Don’t be an idiot, Goyle,” Draco snapped. “Snape would never have done that.”

Harry was inclined to agree; even if Snape had decided to cheat in order to have a Slytherin champion, he wouldn’t have picked Harry. He’d have wanted a sixth or seventh year, someone more likely to win—and if for some reason he’d have chosen a fourth year it would have been Draco’s name he would have put in the goblet, not Harry’s. While Snape had warmed-up to Harry a lot since his first year at Hogwarts, that still left him miles behind most of the other Slytherins, and especially Draco, who was probably Snape’s favorite student in the whole school.

“Oh,” said Goyle turning back to Harry, a disappointed look on his wide face, “right—I forgot, you did that.”

Harry rolled his eyes but didn’t bother to try and correct Goyle. As hard as it was to get an idea into his friend’s thick skull, it was even harder to dislodge one once it had wormed its way inside.

“Anyway,” Harry said, “I’m a lot more interested in knowing what’s up with Crouch. How is it that he’s too sick to show up for the tasks, or even the ball, but he can skulk around up here breaking into people’s offices?”

“A good point,” said Draco. “Obviously he must not really be ill, which means he’s just using that as a cover to excuse what he’s really up to…but what could that be?”

Harry shook his head. “No idea,” he said. “D’you reckon he’s still mad about his house-elf?”

“Granger said the elf was working here now, didn’t she?” Crabbe suddenly asked, giving his recalcirant cushion a hard kick after it refused to move when he waved his wand at it. “Maybe he wants it back.”

“Why on earth would anyone want a disobedient house-elf working for them?” Draco asked in a funny sort of voice.

Crabbe shrugged. “Maybe he can’t get another one easy, and he’s tired of taking care of himself? Or maybe the elf knows something he don’t want anybody else finding out.”

His cheeks pink, Draco determinedly sent his cushion flying across the room and into the box they were all supposed to be aiming at. “Anyway,” he said shrilly, “that doesn’t explain what he was doing in Snape’s office. Unless you think he decided to check the whole school and just _happened_ to be in the middle of checking Professor Snape’s office when Harry and Moody caught wind of him?”

Crabbe shrugged again. “Dunno,” he said.

“What I want to know,” Harry said curiously, “is what Snape did with his first chance, if he’s on his second one. What do you think Moody was talking about?” His friends didn’t say anything, but Harry was too distracted to notice their sudden silence: his cushion, to his great surprise, had just flown straight across the room and landed neatly on top of Draco’s.

 

“So,” Draco asked him, as they all trooped downstairs for lunch later, “what about the egg, then?”

“What?” said Harry, looking up, distracted, from his notes on Transfiguring invertebrates. “What about the egg?”

Draco rolled his eyes. “The egg, Harry, the golden egg? The one that holds a secret clue to your next task? You know, the one you had to fight a bloody dragon in order to get? What other egg would I possibly be talking about?” he mocked in a scathing voice.

“Yeah, of course,” said Harry, feeling his cheeks growing hot. “I know what egg you meant, I just mean, what about it?”

“The clue, you idiot! What was the clue?”

Harry frowned. “Don’t you remember it?” he said. “I wouldn’t have thought it was easy to forget, myself….”

“Oh,” said Draco breezily, “I never actually figured it out. I just said that so you’d stop wasting time and try Diggory’s hint.”

Harry gawked so hard that he stumbled right back into the trick step that Moody had had to haul him out of the night before. “You WHAT?” he exclaimed, causing several of his classmates to turn around and stare at him. Draco waved them away, but it wasn’t until Crabbe cracked his knuckles and started forward threateningly that they scurried off down the stairs. Goyle heaved Harry out of the trick step and set him back on his feet. “You what?” Harry repeated, still gaping at Draco.

He shrugged, looking unbearably smug. “Yep,” he said, “I used an Aguamenti on my hair to make it look like I’d been in a bath, and put your egg and the Marauder’s Map out on the table so you’d think I’d been sneaking around with them.”

Harry kept staring.

“Pretty clever, right?” Draco said, preening. “So anyway—what did you figure out?”

“You—you—!” Harry stammered, too outraged to form words. Then he gave up and fell into step alongside his friends again. “You have to put the egg underwater to turn the screeching into words,” he explained, shaking his head in rueful admiration. “Then it becomes a song that says…hang on….

_“Come seek us where our voices sound,_  
_We cannot sing above the ground,_  
 _And while you’re searching, ponder this:_  
 _We’ve taken what you’ll sorely miss,_  
 _An hour long you’ll have to look,_  
 _And to recover what we took,_  
 _But past an hour—the prospect’s black,_  
 _Too late, it’s gone, it won’t come back.”_

He looked at his friends. “Well?” he demanded.

Draco frowned; the other two stared at him blankly.

“It probably sounds more like singing when the egg does it, huh?” observed Goyle.

Harry rolled his eyes.

“Well,” said Draco thoughtfully, “obviously it must be referring to under _water_ , not underground, since that’s what you have to do to hear the egg properly…and the only big body of water around here is the lake…so whatever you’re looking for probably lives there…the merfolk, do you think?”

“That was my guess too,” Harry admitted, a little annoyed that Draco had figured it out so quickly. “Are there merpeople in the lake?”

“Of course!” Draco looked surprised that Harry didn’t already know that. “They tend to give the castle a wide berth, so you’re not likely to see them through the common room windows, but sometimes people claim to have spotted one or two swimming around—ask Pansy, she says she’s seen one three, four times, but she’s probably lying—and anyway, the colony in the lake is the largest in Great Britain, so yeah; of course there are merpeople in the Great Lake.”

Rather than taking umbrage at Draco’s derisive tone, Harry decided to focus on the facts of what he had said: “Okay, then it’s definitely got to be about merpeople. That still leaves the question of how I’m supposed to breathe in the lake for an hour.”

“Not to mention _what_ they’re going to take,” Draco pointed out.

“Firebolt,” Goyle grunted.

All three of them stopped to look at him, even Crabbe, who ordinarily would let nothing short of a dragon delay his arrival at lunch. “What’s that?” said Harry.

Goyle looked back at him blankly. “Well, if I wanted to take something you really liked, that I knew you’d want to get back, that’s what I’d take from you,” he said.

“That’s actually not a stupid idea,” Draco said.

“Well,” said Harry, trying to sound cheerful, and not like his stomach had just tied itself up in knots, “at least my broomstick won’t be damaged from being stuck underwater for an hour—right?” He swallowed nervously.

“Probably not,” Draco agreed, but he didn’t sound very sure of it. “I mean—they’re certainly waterproof, broomsticks, what with Quidditch being played in all sorts of weather…but I’m not sure that anyone’s ever done studies on what prolonged submersion will do to an elite racing broomstick. There might be…I don’t know…swelling?” He winced.

“Great,” said Harry, his heart sinking as they walked into the Great Hall. “So not only do I have to worry about figuring out how to hold my breath for an hour, I have to worry about what condition my broomstick will be in when I do finally get it back.” He shook his head. “I hope I figure out who put my name in that goblet eventually,” he said darkly. “I owe them a really serious talking to.”

He didn’t notice Draco smirking at Crabbe and Goyle behind his back. “Of course you do,” he agreed smoothly. “But for now, let’s concentrate on….” His voice trailed-off as they walked past a group of Durmstrang boys. He and Harry exchanged a look, then went to find seats all the way at the far end of the Slytherin table, where they didn’t have to worry as much about being overheard by any of the foreign students who tended to avoid sitting that close to the staff table.

They discussed the possibilities in low voices, or at least, Harry and Draco discussed the possibilities; Crabbe and Goyle said very little, being too preoccupied with the food.

“Too bad we haven’t covered human Transfiguration in class yet,” Draco mused. “Then you could just turn yourself into a seal or an octopus or something.”

“I suppose I could always shout ‘boo!’ at Moody,” Harry said without thinking, “but I don’t think he’d be generous enough to turn me into something useful.”

Harry regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth, but it was too late to take them back. Draco gave him an exceptionally dark look and turned away, pointedly striking-up a conversation with Pansy and Daphne instead. Harry sighed and focused on his lunch for a while, hoping that his friend wouldn’t sulk for too long. He would need help if he was going to figure out what to do for the second task and Draco was the cleverest friend he had, aside from perhaps Hermione.

It was Goyle who, quite accidentally, broke the icy tension: “What do you mean that’s an _actual chicken?”_ he asked in a loud, horrified voice that drew the attention of everyone within hearing distance, even some of the Ravenclaws. The half-eaten drumstick he had been gnawing on fell from his nerveless hand and splattered in his stewed tomatoes.

Crabbe looked up from his own plate, confusion plain across his thick face. “That’s what it is,” he said stupidly. “Or was, I guess. What’d you think it was?”

“I dunno,” Goyle said. “Just food, I guess—not an animal!”

Crabbe blinked at him. “Most of your food is animals, dummy,” he said.

“Nu-uh,” insisted Goyle, sounding panicky.

Crabbe pointed around the table. “That’s a chicken, and so’s that, and that one’s a cow, and that’s a liver and I dunno what it’s liver _of_ but it’s definitely actually somebody’s liver, yeah…and those ain’t actually fingers but they _are_ actually chicken, and pork chops are chopped off pigs, and so’s bacon, and meatloaf is—”

“Off little piggies?” Goyle asked in a small voice that was almost a whimper.

“Why d’you think they call it that?” Crabbe asked sharply. “’Cause that’s what it is!”

Goyle was shaking his head in disbelief. “But—but there’s all kinds of food that’s just called stuff, but isn’t really that stuff…there’s Toad in the Hole, which ain’t toad at all… and Chocolate Frogs, that ain’t actually frogs…and there’s sponge-fingers, which ain’t sponges _or_ fingers…and it’s not like spotted dick is really—”

“All right!” Draco said loudly, cutting Goyle off before he could list everything he ate. “We get it, lots of food has stupid names.” He shook his head in disgust while Pansy and Daphne dissolved against Millicent’s shoulders, all three of them giggling ferociously. Harry stuffed his knuckles in his mouth in an attempt to restrain his own laughter. “So what?” Draco continued harshly. “I never thought it mattered to you _what_ you were stuffing into your mouth.”

But Goyle was still shaking his head, and now he pushed his plate away from him. “I ain’t eating nothing else until I know it ain’t part of some poor little animal,” he declared. “I ain’t gonna eat no piggies, nor no chickens or cows or bunnies either.”

Draco rolled his eyes. “Have fun eating your rabbit food, then,” he sneered, but Harry was frowning, an idea niggling at the back of his mind. “Hang on,” he said, more to himself than to anyone else, “that reminds me of something…about eating….”

“What’s that, Harry?” Draco asked absently, too busy shaking his head at Goyle (who was protesting that he wasn’t going to eat rabbits _either_ , hadn’t he just said that?) to remember he was supposed to be pretending that Harry didn’t exist.

“Hang on!” Harry repeated, jumping to his feet. “Goyle—your other books, the ones you don’t need for class today, they’re back in your dormitory, right?”

“What?” said Goyle, looking up and blinking at Harry stupidly. “Uh…yeah, I guess so,” he said.

“What do you need Goyle’s books for?” Draco asked. “Have you lost one of yours?”

“I have to go check something!” Harry grabbed his schoolbag and dashed away from the table. He could hear the others following him—Crabbe complaining bitterly at being forced to stop eating before he had finished, Draco shouting that he was going to make them all late for Potions Class—but he ignored them, pounding down the stairs to the dungeon.

_“Campio!”_ he gasped, and jiggled impatiently from one leg to the other while he waited for the stones to grind aside and let him into the common room.

Harry sprinted straight for the fourth year boys’ dormitory, ignoring the startled stares he got from the few students sitting around the common room. He made a beeline for Goyle’s bed, dropping to his knees beside the untidy pile of books and tossing the ones on top aside as he searched for the one he wanted. He heard the others come down the stairs behind him but no one protested his rough handling; Goyle couldn’t have cared less about the condition of his schoolbooks.

“What are you doing?” Draco asked.

“Looking for that book that Moody gave Goyle for extra work,” Harry explained distractedly, dropping _The Standard Book of Spells, Grade Four_ on top of _The Monster Book of Monsters_ , which was growling at him.

“What for?” Goyle asked, looking worried. “I turned in last week’s essay already, and we got a whole weekend before I need you to do the next one with me….”

“I know,” said Harry, “be quiet for a minute.”

He sat down on Goyle’s bed and started leafing impatiently through _Magical Water Plants of the Mediterranean_. “Come on, come on,” he muttered to himself under his breath. “I know there was something in here somewhere…ah-ha!” Harry raised the book triumphantly, holding a page open for the others to see.

They all leaned in for a look, although Draco was probably the only one who was bothering to do more than look at the picture sketched next to the entry. “Gillyweed?” said Draco curiously.

“Gillyweed!” Harry echoed. “I knew I remembered reading something that would help! Look, see?” He pushed the book into Draco’s arms. “All you have to do is eat it, and you grow gills and flippers and stuff, and you can breathe underwater! Lasts about an hour, too! It’s perfect.”

Draco’s pale eyes flickered as he quickly read through the entry on gillyweed. “It certainly seems it,” he said, frowning suspiciously.

“What?” Harry demanded, his turn to be impatient now.

“Well,” Draco said slowly, “it just seems awfully convenient, doesn’t it? That Moody should assign a book that just _happens_ to have an article about the one plant that would perfectly solve the second task for you?”

“What, you think he was trying to cheat?” Harry shook his head. “What good would assigning a book to Goyle do _me?_ It’s not like Moody could have expected that he’d remember the one herb in there that I’d need weeks later, Moody’s not an idiot….”

“No,” Draco agreed, “he’s not—which means he surely suspects that Goyle isn’t doing all those essays by himself.”

Harry frowned. “So then…what do you think he’s doing?”

“I reckon he’s trying to make sure you win the tournament,” said Draco quietly.

The thought was, somehow, distasteful. Harry wrinkled his nose. “You mean like Bagman?” he asked.

Draco waved the comparison away. “No, no, far more subtly than Bagman,” he said. “That man’s an embarrassment…but I _do_ think this proves that Moody is definitely on your side in this tournament.” His face suddenly brightened. “Which means,” he said, turning to look at Crabbe and Goyle, “that he’s sort of on our side too, isn’t he?”

“So you believe his apology now?” asked Harry, who had of course passed along Moody’s words from last night, although they hadn’t gone over well.

Draco hesitated. “Well,” he said, “I guess…at least, he probably won’t do anything nasty to us again, not as long as he wants you to trust him enough that you’ll let him help you win.”

Harry shook his head, but he didn’t argue. If it would stop Draco from cringing every time Moody looked his way in Defense Against the Dark Arts lessons, Harry was more than willing to agree that the ex-Auror was cheating at the tournament on his behalf.

 

Obedient to Sirius’s wish of hearing about anything odd at Hogwarts, Harry sent him a letter by brown owl that night, explaining all about Mr. Crouch breaking into Snape’s office, and Moody and Snape’s conversation. Then Harry turned his attention in earnest to the most urgent problem facing him: how to get his hands on enough gillyweed to survive underwater for an hour on the twenty-fourth of February.

 “Gillyweed, though—that’s a pretty rare herb, Harry,” Draco said that evening, when they should have been working on their Transfiguration essays. “You’re not going to find that in the student store cupboard, I don’t think. I doubt we’ll be working with that in class until N.E.W.T.s level, and even then—”

“Well then where am I going to get some?” Harry demanded, inexplicably furious; he had figured out the clue, had figured out what to do about the second task—not, admittedly, on his own, but so what? None of them had figured out the dragons on their own, he told himself placatingly, conveniently forgetting that they had been meant to be surprised by the dragons—and now, he was going to be thwarted because no one had a few sprigs of some dumb bush that he could swallow before he walked into the Great Lake on February the twenty-fourth?

“Ordinarily I’d say you could order some,” Draco said slowly, his gray eyes narrowed in thought, “but that runs the risk of letting the other champions in on your plan, if someone spots the delivery, and you don’t want to do that….”

“No,” Harry admitted, “but I’d rather let them in on it than have to abandon it altogether.”

“Better if you can get it without the chance of any of them seeing it, though,” Draco said.

“Have Greengrass get you some,” Crabbe suggested, in between bites of a huge drumstick. “Her parents own a ‘poth’cary, don’t they?”

Harry brightened up. “Do they?” he said. He turned to look up the table to where Daphne Greengrass sat, her head bowed in quiet conversation with Pansy Parkinson, both of them giggling nastily and shooting looks over their shoulders at a group of gloomy-looking third years.

Draco was looking as well, his gray eyes narrow. “I’m not sure that would be much more subtle than ordering it yourself,” he drawled, staring at Pansy.

Harry’s shoulders slumped. “Maybe _less_ subtle,” he grumbled.

Draco absently smoothed his hair. “The best thing to do would be to get it from someone who already has some at Hogwarts,” he said slowly.

“And who at Hogwarts is going to just happen to have gillyweed lying around?” Harry demanded.

 

Harry, Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle lingered after Potions class finished on Tuesday, even though it meant they ran the risk of being late for Transfiguration. Harry shifted nervously from foot to foot while the rest of the class cleaned up their tables and trotted out the door. “I still think you should be the one to ask him,” he whispered to Draco, who rolled his eyes.

“Harry, come _on_ ,” Draco retorted, “you’re the Triwizard champion, not me!” His voice held only the barest trace of bitterness; ever since the first task, Draco had demonstrated more and more contentedness with being a champion’s best friend rather than a champion himself, although he was still apt to sulk if Harry got too much attention.

“Yeah,” Harry muttered back, “but Snape likes you more.”

Draco preened. “True,” he agreed, “but I’m not the one who needs gillyweed—you are.”

There was little Harry could say to that so he sighed, shouldered his schoolbag, and trudged up to Snape’s desk. The Potions Master was quietly sorting through the essays the class had turned in, a scornful look on his sallow face. Hesitant about interrupting, Harry cleared his throat and tried to ignore Draco nudging him repeatedly in the back. “Er—sir?” Harry said.

Professor Snape looked up slowly, his black eyes fixing on Harry’s green ones with all the warmth and gentleness of a black hole. “What can I do for you, Mr. Potter?” he asked.

“Gillyweed,” Harry burst-out with, “I need some gillyweed. I mean—I need to borrow some, sir, if you don’t mind, please. I, I mean—I guess not borrow, exactly,” Harry corrected himself frantically, “since I won’t exactly be, er, able to give it back when I’m done, but….”

He fell silent as Professor Snape continued to stare at him unblinkingly. The Potions Master slowly drew his hands in together, steepled them in front of him, and rested his long hooked nose on the tips of his fingers. Harry swallowed. “Gillyweed,” Snape repeated. His eyes flashed briefly to Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle, then returned to rest coolly on Harry’s face. “And what, pray tell,” he asked, “could you possibly require gillyweed for?”

“The second task,” Harry said breathlessly. “The Triwizard Tournament. Please, I—I have to go into the lake. I mean, I’m pretty sure that’s what I have to do. For an hour.”

Snape raised an eyebrow. “And…?”

“And—er…find something?” Harry said. He felt like squirming but forced himself to hold still. _My Firebolt_ , he said to himself, _I’m sure it’s my Firebolt_ …. Aloud, he said, “And if I had some gillyweed, I could breathe underwater, but I don’t have any, and I was hoping you did, sir. And that you would, er, give me some. Please?”

“He doesn’t want to order any,” Draco chimed-in over Harry’s shoulder, “because he doesn’t want the other champions seeing it when it arrives, in case they haven’t thought of using it yet, or haven’t figured out the clue of the egg.”

Snape’s black eyes slowly traveled from Harry’s face to Draco’s. “And your role in this, Mr. Malfoy?” he asked.

“Well—we’re helping him, of course,” Draco said, quite unabashed. “We’re his friends, aren’t we?” When Snape continued to stare at them all without speaking, Draco added, “And anyway, shouldn’t we all be supporting the Slytherin champion for a Hogwarts victory?”

Harry held his breath. Hidden in the sleeve of his robe, he crossed his fingers. _Please_ , he thought, _please don’t be mad…please don’t say we’re cheating, I figured out the clue on my own—well, mostly on my own…well, without Draco’s help anyway…well, mostly without Draco’s help…it was Cedric, it was Cedric’s idea and he owed me for the dragons, please, that isn’t cheating, that’s just fair play…._

Professor Snape suddenly stood up, making all four of them jump. “Follow me,” he said, and led the way around the back of his desk with a billow of black robes. Harry, Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle scrambled to keep up. Snape unlocked the door along the back wall between the Potions classroom and his office and stepped inside. The others followed, crowding together nervously, although Draco stepped out a little ways in front of everyone, looking around, his pointed face alight with interest.

The shadowy walls were lined with shelves of large glass jars, in which floated all manner of revolting things Harry didn’t really want to know the name of at the moment—not unless one of them was called gillyweed. The fireplace was dark and empty. Professor Snape, now paying them little attention, started sorting through a crowded section of jars along the wall behind his desk. Goyle started to wander toward the shelves, but Harry caught the back of his robes. He didn’t want Goyle blundering across something that Snape didn’t want touched and raising his ire, not now.

Snape turned around abruptly, a squat jar in his hands. The liquid inside was too murky for Harry to make out its contents, but he felt a flash of hope. He crossed his fingers again.

“Gillyweed,” Snape said, placing the jar on his desk. He opened the jar, lifted a pair of silver tongs, and fished out what looked like a ball of slimy, grayish-green rat tails.

“Eurgh,” said Crabbe delightedly. Harry was too excited to care how unappetizing the gillyweed looked. “Thanks, Professor!” he said, grinning.

Professor Snape slid the gillyweed into a stoppered vial, which he handed to Harry. “There is enough there for slightly more than an hour’s use,” Snape explained briskly. “I suggest that you use a stem or two for an advance trial, as the consumption of raw gillyweed can be a…singular sensation.”

“Thank you, sir,” Harry said again, pocketing the vial of gillyweed and beaming. “I will.”

Snape studied Harry with an odd, thoughtful look on his face. Then he said sharply, “Well? Do you all not have a class to get to?”

Suddenly remembering Transfiguration, Harry jumped. “Right!” he said. “We better hurry—thanks again, professor!”

The four of them bolted back through the Potions classroom and out the door, sprinting up the steps. Snape, saying nothing, watched them go, his black eyes glittering in the dim light.

Professor McGonagall was not pleased with their late arrival, but when Harry—panting hard and massaging the stitch in his side—explained that they had been working on something crucial to the second task, she gave them a very hard look and ushered them into their seats without taking points. Her expression remained thin-lipped and tight, as though she had just swallowed a very large lemon, for the remainder of the class period but when the bell rang to signal the end of the school day she said tersely, “Good luck, Potter,” as he and his friends trooped out the door toward dinner.

As the date of the second task drew nearer, Harry did not exactly grow panicked, but he didn’t feel confident, either. He and Draco had sneaked out to the prefects’ bathroom again over the week-end to practice with the gillyweed, but while Draco expressed great confidence in the herb’s effectiveness, Harry wasn’t so sure. He thought there was probably a big difference between the experience of growing gills in a warm, comfortable bath where one’s feet were never in danger of losing contact with the floor, and submerging oneself in a cold, deep lake with nothing but a few bites of a strange, squishy herb to enable one to keep breathing when one was far, far away from any hopes of air.

The lake, which Harry had always taken for granted as just another feature of the grounds, drew his eyes whenever he was near a classroom window, a great, iron-gray mass of chilly water, whose dark and icy depths were starting to seem as distant as the moon.

Just as it had before he faced the Horntail, time was slipping away as though somebody had bewitched the clocks to go extra-fast. There was a week to go before February the twenty-fourth (they visited the prefects’ bathroom, with Crabbe and Goyle standing guard in case Cedric came in, and tested the gillyweed)…there were five days to go (Harry read and re-read the section on gillyweed in _Magical Water Plants of the Mediterranean_ until he could quote it from memory)…three days to go (he had taken to carrying the vial of gillyweed around in his pocket, and touching it in between classes to make sure it was still there)…

With two days left, Harry started to go off food again. Goyle, on the other hand, was back to eating—but he refused to touch anything that he thought once been part of an animal, to Crabbe’s continued annoyance. The only good thing about breakfast on Monday was the return of the brown owl Harry had sent to Sirius. He pulled off the parchment, unrolled it, and saw the shortest letter Sirius had ever written to him.

 

> _Send date of next Hogsmeade weekend by return owl._

Harry turned the parchment over and looked at the back, hoping to see something else, but it was blank.

“Go on,” urged Draco, who had leaned over Harry’s shoulder to read the note, “write him back. Weekend after next, remember? What, don’t you have a quill?”

Harry scribbled the dates down on the back of Sirius’s letter, tied it onto the brown owl’s leg, and watched it take flight again. What had he expected? A reassuring anecdote of all the times Sirius had used gillyweed without complication? He had been so intent on telling Sirius all about Snape and Moody he had completely forgotten to mention his plans for the second task.

“Why does he want to know?” Goyle asked, shoveling scrambled eggs into his mouth. (Despite Pansy’s attempt to explain to him that eggs were baby birds, Goyle had refused to stop eating them. “I’m not stupid,” he’d told Pansy scathingly. “I know what baby chickens look like, and they ain’t eggs!”) His tiny eyes lit up. “You don’t think he’s gonna come visit, do you?” he asked excitedly.

“Dunno,” said Harry dully. The momentary happiness that had flared inside of him at the sight of the owl had died. “Come on…Care of Magical Creatures.”

Even the happy fact that Hagrid was back teaching, and Professor Grubbly-Plank gone back to wherever she had come from, could not brighten Harry’s mood—although the rest of the class was split between disappointment and delight at his return.

Whether Hagrid was trying to make up for the Blast-Ended Skrewts, or because there were now only two skrewts left, or because he was trying to prove he could do anything that Professor Grubbly-Plank could, Harry didn’t know, but Hagrid had been continuing her lessons on unicorns ever since he’d returned to work. It turned out that Hagrid knew quite as much about unicorns as he did about monsters, though it was clear that he found their lack of poisonous fangs disappointing.

Today he had managed to capture two unicorn foals. Unlike full-grown unicorns, they were pure gold. Millicent and the Gryffindor girls went into transports of delight at the sight of them, and even Pansy had to work hard to conceal how much she liked them.

“Easier ter spot than the adults,” Hagrid told the class. “They turn silver when they’re abou’ two years old, an’ they grow horns at aroun’ four. Don’ go pure white till they’re full grown, ‘round about seven. They’re a bit more trustin’ when they’re babies…don’ mind boys so much…C’mon, move in a bit, yeh can pat ‘em if yeh want…give ‘em a few o’ these sugar lumps….

“You okay, Harry?” Hagrid muttered, moving aside slightly, while most of the others swarmed around the baby unicorns.

“Yeah,” said Harry, eager to change the subject. “I’m glad you decided to start teaching again.”

“Oh, well,” Hagrid muttered into his beard, his ruddy cheeks flushing. “Professor Dumbledore came ter see me…tol’ me I was bein’ stupid…guess I was, a bit….”

Fortunately Draco was too preoccupied trying to decide whether he was annoyed or delighted that one of the baby unicorns was chewing on his sleeve to be listening, so he couldn’t say anything nasty to Hagrid about his intellect, or lack thereof.

Harry patted his large friend on the arm. “You know, Hagrid,” he said wisely, “I reckon we all get a bit stupid sometimes, especially when we start worrying about other people not liking us.”

“Ar,” said Hagrid, his black eyes filling with sudden wetness, “yeh’re a smart lad, Harry.” He clapped a massive hand on Harry’s shoulder, so that his knees buckled under its weight. “Yeh don’ have nothin’ ter be nervous abou’. I’d’ve bin worried before I saw yeh take on tha’ Horntail, but I know now yeh can do anythin’ yeh set yer mind ter. I’m not worried at all. Yeh’re goin’ ter be fine. Got yet clue worked out, haven’ yeh?”

Harry nodded, but even as he did so, a desperate desire for reassurance came over him. Even after his swim in the prefects’ bathroom, he couldn’t believe that chewing a handful of herbs was the best way for him to survive at the bottom of the lake for an hour. He looked up at Hagrid—perhaps he had to go into the lake sometimes, to deal with the creatures in it? He looked after everything else on the grounds, after all—maybe he had used Gillyweed before, and could tell Harry more about it than the short entry in Goyle’s book—

“Yeh’re goin’ ter win,” Hagrid growled, patting Harry’s shoulder again, so that Harry actually felt himself sink a couple of inches into the soft ground. “That’ll show ‘em all…yeh don’ have ter be pureblood to do it. Yeh don’ have ter be ashamed of what yeh are. It’ll show ‘em Dumbledore’s the one who’s got it righ’, lettin’ anyone in as long as they can do magic. All yeh gotta do is win—and yeh will. I know it. I can feel it. _Yeh’re goin’ ter win, Harry.”_

Harry just couldn’t bring himself to risk wiping that happy, confident smile off Hagrid’s face. Pretending he was interested in the young unicorns, he forced a smile in return, and moved forward to pat them with the others.

 

The night before the task, Harry couldn’t concentrate on his homework at all. He kept feeling like he was going to throw up; kept tasting bile in the back of his throat, bile that tasted suspiciously like the gillyweed he had tried in the prefects’ bathroom. What if it didn’t work tomorrow? What if it wore off when he was somewhere on the bottom of the lake, too far away from the surface to get there before he ran out of air? What if—

“Hey,” Harry said suddenly, breaking the silence that had fallen over the little corner where he, Draco, Crabbe, Goyle, Pansy, and Daphne were working on their homework—or at least pretending to work on it, although from how often the others paused to sneak glances at Harry, he suspected he wasn’t the only one having a hard time concentrating. “What do you say about going down to the lake and just—just trying the gillyweed down there? Just to see if it works….”

“At this hour?” Draco raised his eyebrows. “It’ll be pitch black out there by now, not to mention freezing.”

“Not to mention after curfew,” Pansy pointed out sharply. “You’d better not go wandering off anywhere now, what if someone catches you?”

Harry and Draco exchanged a look. Pansy did not, of course, know about Harry’s Invisibility Cloak, and Harry wanted to keep it that way; the fewer people who knew about his dad’s cloak, the better. Telling Pansy Parkinson would be equivalent to telling half the school.

Goyle opened his mouth, probably to explain why Harry and Draco didn’t have to worry about getting caught sneaking around as much as most people did—he was quite good about keeping the secrets he was told to, Goyle was, as long as he was regularly reminded about _what_ he wasn’t supposed to be telling people—but before either Harry or Draco could move to stop him from speaking Adelaide Essex, one of Slytherin’s sixth year prefects, walked over to them.

“Oi, Malfoy,” she said, and they all turned to look at her. “You’re wanted in Professor Snape’s office. I’m supposed to take you down.”

“Really?” said Draco, sounding curious. “What on earth for?” But he was already packing his things away; no Slytherin would refuse a summons from their Head of House, although most of them probably would have looked more nervous at being called there after nightfall than did Draco.

Essex shrugged. “I didn’t ask,” she said in a withering voice. “Come on, don’t keep him waiting—and you, Potter. Shouldn’t you be getting to bed soon? Big day tomorrow, right?”

Harry nodded. “Right,” he said, and started collecting his own books. “Here,” he offered to Draco, “I’ll take your stuff down with mine, no sense making Snape wait.”

“Thanks,” said Draco brightly, dumping his pile of books and parchment into Harry’s arms. “See you all in a bit,” he said, and flounced off with Essex.

“It’s not fair,” Daphne muttered. “I wish _I_ was that confident of never getting in trouble.”

“Draco gets in plenty of trouble,” Harry said. “Just never from Snape, and not usually stuff he can’t talk his way out of.”

Daphne stuck her tongue out at him. “You wouldn’t be so blasé about it if you weren’t usually standing next to him taking advantage of how slippery he is,” she said tartly.

Harry laughed. “Maybe not,” he agreed, “but since I _am_ ….” He shrugged.

Daphne shook her head. “Oh go to bed, Potter,” she said. “Essex is right—you’re going to be in over your head tomorrow anyway, better get a good night’s sleep first.”

The others laughed and Harry saluted them all with a rude gesture, then climbed down the stairs to the fourth year boys’ dormitory. He lay awake most of the night, staring up blankly at the ceiling. Sometime before dawn, he finally drifted off into dreams of drowning.

He didn’t realize that he never heard Draco come in.

 

There was no sign of Draco at breakfast the next morning which unnerved not only Harry, but Crabbe and Goyle as well. The two burly boys stuck close to Harry’s side, looking skittish and somehow diminished without their skinny blond leader. Harry scowled down the length of the table, stirring his eggs around on his plate without tasting them. “Where is he?” he asked, annoyed. He leaned across the table and repeated, “Hey, Parkinson—any idea where Draco is?”

Pansy shook her head. “I haven’t seen him since last night,” she said. “You’re the one who shares a dormitory with him. How’d you lot manage to misplace him?”

“I don’t know,” said Harry, “he was already gone when we woke up.”

“I dunno if he ever came back,” Crabbe said thickly through a mouthful of sausages.

“Maybe Snape kept him overnight in detention?” Goyle suggested, through an equally large mouthful of toast.

Pansy shrank back, wrinkling her nose as they sprayed bits of food across the table, but Harry frowned thoughtfully. “I don’t think Snape’s _ever_ given Draco a detention,” he said. “I can’t imagine he’d start now.” He looked up at the staff table, where the teachers were eating breakfast. It was easy to spot Snape: his black robes stood out sharply next to McGonagall’s rich tartan and Flitwick’s pointed paisley hat. He looked stiff and surly, but that was hardly out of character for Snape. Harry’s eyes roamed across the staff table until he met Moody’s looking back at him. The scarred ex-Auror grinned at him which, while hardly being a sight to improve one’s appetite, at least had the benefit of reminding Harry that there was someone at Hogwarts keeping an eye on him.

He wondered how good Moody’s magical eye was at seeing through water. If Harry got in trouble on the bottom of the lake, would Moody send someone down to rescue him before he drowned?

All too soon, it was time to leave the warmth and comfort of the Great Hall and head out onto the bright, chilly grounds.

Harry walked down the lawn alongside Cedric, Fleur, and Viktor, none of them talking, all of them looking as nervous as Harry felt—or at least, Cedric and Fleur looked nervous; Krum still looked surly, but Harry thought he was frowning more than usual, which he assumed meant that Krum was nervous too.

As they drew closer, Harry saw that the seats that had encircled the dragons’ enclosure in November were now ranged along the opposite bank, rising in stands that were already starting to fill with a trickle of students and which were reflected on the lake below. The excited babble of the crowd echoed strangely across the water as Harry and the other champions walked around the other side of the lake toward the judges, who were sitting at another gold-draped table at the water’s edge. Harry recognized all five of the judges, but once again Mr. Crouch had failed to turn up: Percy Weasley, Ron’s older brother, was sitting where he should have been.

Karkaroff jumped to his feet and hurried over to Krum, talking quietly and fussing over him. It was hard to tell if Krum was listening or not; his expression didn’t change, but he did let Karkaroff take his heavy fur cloak away, leaving him wearing swimming trunks.

Harry, pulling off his own cloak, wondered if he should have changed out of his robes too, but a quick look at Cedric and Fleur confirmed that they were both dressed normally. Besides, Harry reminded himself, he didn’t own any swimming trunks. The Dursleys, no doubt hoping that Harry would drown one day, hadn’t bothered to give him any lessons in swimming, let alone anything to wear during the activity.

Harry squinted at the gathering crowd, looking for his friends. Crabbe and Goyle were easy to spot—they had secured a space right at the front of the lowest row of seats, probably through the simple expedient of pushing everyone else out of their way—but he couldn’t see Draco anywhere. Hermione Granger’s unmistakable mane of bushy brown hair was nowhere in sight either, although Harry spotted Ron and his little sister, Ginny, sitting next to Luna Lovegood, the dotty blonde girl whom Harry had taken to the Yule Ball.

Harry looked away quickly, not wanting anyone to think he was looking at Luna on purpose. People had mostly stopped teasing him about having such a weird date, and the last thing he wanted to do was give them an excuse to start up again.

Ludo Bagman jumped to his feet with a broad smile. “Welcome, welcome champions!” he said, rubbing his hands together gleefully. “All ready, eh? All prepared?” he winked at Harry, who quickly turned to look at the crowd again. He did his best to ignore Bagman as he moved among the champions, spacing them along the bank at intervals of ten feet. Harry was on the very end of the line, next to Krum.

“All right, Harry?” Bagman whispered as he moved Harry a few feet farther away from Krum. “Know what you’re going to do?”

“Yes,” Harry said coldly, sticking one hand into his pocket, where he had the rest of the gillyweed that Professor Snape had given him.

Bagman gave Harry’s shoulder a quick squeeze and returned to the judges’ table; he pointed his wand at his throat as he had done at the World Cup, said, _“Sonorus!”_ and his voice boomed out across the dark water toward the stands.

“Well, all our champions are ready for the second task, which will start on my whistle. They have precisely an hour to recover what has been taken from them. On the count of three, then. One…two… _three!”_

The whistle echoed shrilly in the cold, still air; the stands erupted with cheers and applause; without looking to see what the other champions were doing, Harry pulled off his shoes and socks, pulled the vial of gillyweed out of his pocket, poured the whole lot into his mouth, and waded out into the lake.

It was so cold he felt the skin on his legs searing as though this were fire, not icy water. His sodden robes weighed him down as he walked in deeper; now the water was over his knees, and his rapidly numbing feet were slipping over silt and flat, slimy stones. He was chewing the gillyweed as hard and fast as he could; it felt even more unpleasantly slimy and rubbery than it had in the prefects’ bathroom, somehow. Waist-deep in the freezing water he stopped, swallowed, and waited for the gills to grow. He wasn’t sure how long it would take; he had only sampled a small bite when he and Draco had been testing it. Now he had eaten an entire handful—but would that make things happen faster, or just make the effects last longer? Harry wished the entry in Goyle’s book had been more detailed.

He could hear laughter in the crowd and knew he must look stupid, walking into the lake without showing any sign of magical power. The part of him that was still dry was covered in goose pimples; half immersed in icy water, a cruel breeze lifting his hair, Harry started to shiver violently. He avoided looking at the stands; the laughter was becoming louder, and there were catcalls and jeering from some of the watching students….

Then, quite suddenly, the feeling of having an invisible pillow pressed over his nose and mouth returned. Harry would have taken a deep breath to brace himself, but he knew it was no good; he had gills again. Closing his eyes, he flung himself forward into the water.

The first gulp of icy lake water felt like the breath of life. Surprisingly, the water didn’t feel icy anymore either…on the contrary, he felt pleasantly cool and very light…. Having only tried the gillyweed before in a warm bath, Harry had not realized that it would affect the way his body reacted to the water’s temperature. He grinned to himself, raised his webbed hands, and kicked out, diving into the depths.

Silence pressed upon his ears as he soared over a strange, dark, foggy landscape. He could only see ten feet around him, so that as he sped through the water new scenes seemed to loom suddenly out of the oncoming darkness: forests of rippling, tangled black weeds, wide plains of mud littered with dull, glimmering stones. He swam deeper and deeper, out toward the middle of the lake, his eyes wide, staring through the eerily gray-lit water around him to the shadows beyond, where the water became opaque.

Aside from his lingering worries about what condition his Firebolt would be in once he had retrieved it, Harry actually found himself enjoying the experience—although his quick fight with the grindylows was an event he would have gladly skipped, had he been given the option. He was glad that his Defense Against the Dark Arts lessons last year had taught him about the little creatures’ weak point (their long, brittle fingers) and even more glad to discover that his wand still worked underwater, even though he couldn’t really hear himself speaking.

Somehow, Moaning Myrtle had no trouble making herself heard underwater—perhaps being dead, and unable to breathe, meant that she didn’t actually _speak_ at all—although the unexpected sound of her voice had nearly given Harry a heart attack. He was willing to forgive her for the fright, however, because she had pointed him in the right direction.

He swam on for what felt like at least twenty minutes. He was passing over vast expanses of black mud now, which swirled murkily as he disturbed the water. Then, at long last, he heard a snatch of haunting mersong.

_“An hour long you’ll have to look, and to recover what we took…”_

Harry swam faster and soon saw a large rock emerge out of the muddy water ahead. It had paintings of merpeople on it; they were carrying spears and chasing what looked like the giant squid. Harry swam on past the rock, following the mersong.

_“…your time’s half gone, so tarry not, lest what you seek stays here to rot….”_

A cluster of crude stone dwellings stained with algae loomed suddenly out of the gloom on all sides. Here and there at the dark windows, Harry saw faces…faces that bore no resemblance at all to the painting of the mermaid in the prefects’ bathroom….

The merpeople had grayish skin and long, wild, dark green hair. Their eyes were yellow, as were their broken teeth, and they wore thick ropes of pebbles around their necks. They leered at Harry as he swam past; one or two of them emerged from their caves to watch him better, their powerful, silver fish tails beating the water, spears clutched in their hands.

Harry sped on, staring around, and soon the dwellings became more numerous; there were gardens of weeds around some of them, and he even saw a pet grindylow tied to a stake outside one door. Merpeople were emerging on all sides now, watching him eagerly, pointing at his webbed hands and gills, talking behind their hands to one another. Harry sped around a corner and a very strange sight met his eyes.

A whole crowd of merpeople was floating in front of the houses that lined what looked like a mer-version of a village square. A choir of merpeople was singing in the middle, calling the champions toward them, and behind them rose a crude sort of structure; a gigantic merperson hewn from a bolder. Four people were bound tightly to the tail of the stone merperson.

Draco was tied between Hermione and Cho Chang. There was a girl who looked no older than eight, whose clouds of silvery hair made Harry feel sure that she was Fleur Delacour’s sister. All four of them appeared to be in a very deep sleep. Their heads were lolling onto their shoulders, and fine streams of bubbles kept issuing from their mouths.

_It’s not my Firebolt at all,_ Harry thought, feeling both silly and relieved at the same time—and then, suddenly, even more worried than before. Broomsticks, after all, could be replaced, even broomsticks that cost a fortune and flew better and faster than anything else on the market. Friends, however….

Harry sped toward the hostages, half expecting the merpeople to lower their spears and charge at him, but they did nothing. The ropes of weed tying the hostages to the statue were thick, slimy, and very strong. For a fleeting second he thought of the knife Sirius had bought him for Christmas—locked in his trunk in the castle a quarter of a mile away, no use to him whatsoever.

He looked around. Many of the merpeople surrounding him were carrying spears. He swam swiftly toward a seven-foot-tall merman with a long green beard and a choker of shark fangs and tried to mime a request to borrow the spear. The merman laughed and shook his head.

“We do not help,” he said in a harsh, croaky voice.

“Come _ON!”_ Harry said fiercely (but only bubbles issues from his mouth) and tried to pull the spear away from the merman, but the merman yanked it back, still shaking his head and laughing

Harry swirled around, staring about. Something sharp...anything…

There were rocks littering the lake bottom. He dived and snatched up a particularly jagged one and returned to the statue. He began to hack at the ropes binding Draco, and after several minutes’ hard work, they broke apart. Draco floated, unconscious, a few inches above the lake bottom, drifting a little in the ebb of the water.

Harry looked around. There was no sign of the other champions. What were they playing at? Why didn't they hurry up? He turned back to Hermione, raised the jagged rock, and began to hack at her bonds too—

At once, several pairs of strong gray hands seized him. Half a dozen mermen were pulling him away from Hermione, shaking their green-haired heads, and laughing.

“You take your own hostage,” one of them said to him. “Leave the others…”

_“She's_ my friend too!” Harry yelled, gesturing toward Hermione, an enormous silver bubble emerging soundlessly from his lips. “And I don't want _them_ to die either!”

Cho’s head was on Hermione’s shoulder; the small silver-haired girl was ghostly green and pale. Harry struggled to fight off the mermen, but they laughed harder than ever, holding him back. Harry looked wildly around. Where were the other champions? Would he have time to take Draco to the surface and come back down for Hermione and the others? Would he be able to find them again? He looked down at his watch to see how much time was left—it had stopped working.

But then the merpeople around him started pointing excitedly over his head. Harry looked up and saw Cedric swimming toward him. There was an enormous bubble around his head, which made his features look oddly wide and stretched.

“Get lost!” he mouthed, looking panic-stricken. “Fleur and Krum’re coming now!”

Feeling enormously relieved, Harry watched Cedric pull a knife out of his pocket and cut Cho free. He pulled her upward and out of sight.

Harry looked around, waiting. Where were Fleur and Krum? Time was getting short, and according to the song, the hostages would be lost after an hour….

The merpeople started screeching animatedly. Those holding Harry loosened their grip, staring behind him. Harry turned and saw something monstrous cutting through the water toward them: a human body in swimming trunks with the head of a shark…. It was Krum. He appeared to have Transfigured himself—but badly.

The shark-man swam straight to Hermione and began snapping and biting at her ropes; the trouble was that Krum’s new teeth were positioned very awkwardly for biting anything smaller than a dolphin, and Harry was quite sure that if Krum wasn’t careful, he was going to rip Hermione in half. Darting forward, Harry hit Krum hard on the shoulder and held up the jagged stone. Krum seized it and began to cut Hermione free. Within seconds, he had done it; he grabbed Hermione around the waist, and without a backward glance, began to rise rapidly with her toward the surface.

_Now what?_ Harry thought desperately. If he could be sure that Fleur was coming…. But still no sign. There was nothing to be done except…

He snatched up the stone, which Krum had dropped, but the mermen now closed in around Draco and the little girl, shaking their heads at him. Harry pulled out his wand.

“Get out of the way!”

Only bubbles flew out of his mouth, but he had the distinct impression that the mermen had understood him, because they suddenly stopped laughing. Their yellowish eyes were fixed upon Harry’s wand, and they looked scared. There might be a lot more of them than there were of him, but Harry could tell, by the looks on their faces, that they knew no more magic than the giant squid did.

“You’ve got until three!” Harry shouted; a great stream of bubbles burst from him, but he held up three fingers to make sure they got the message. “One…” (he put down a finder) “two…” (he put down a second one)—

They scattered. Harry darted forward and began to hack at the ropes binding the small girl to the statue, and at last she was free. He seized the little girl around the waist, grabbed the neck of Draco’s robes, and kicked off from the bottom.

It was very slow work. He could no longer use his webbed hands to propel himself forward; he worked his flippers furiously, but Draco and Fleur’s sister were like potato-filled sacks dragging him back down…. He fixed his eyes skyward, though he knew he must still be very deep, the water above him was so dark….

Merpeople were rising with him. He could see them swirling around him with ease, watching him struggle through the water…. Would they pull him back down to the depths when the time was up? Did they perhaps eat humans? Harry’s legs were seizing up with the effort to keep swimming; his shoulders were aching horribly with the effort of dragging Draco and the girl….

He was drawing breath with extreme difficulty. He could feel pain on the sides of his neck again…he was becoming very aware of how wet the water was in his mouth…yet the darkness was definitely thinning now…he could see daylight above him….

He kicked hard with his flippers and discovered that they were nothing more than feet…water was flooding through his mouth into his lungs…he was starting to feel dizzy, but he knew light and air were only ten feet above him…he had to get there…he had to…

Harry kicked his legs so hard and fast it felt as though his muscles were screaming in protest; his very brain felt waterlogged, he couldn’t breathe, he needed oxygen, he had to keep going, he could not stop—

And then he felt his head break the surface of the lake; wonderful, cold, clear air was making his wet face sting; he gulped it down, feeling as though he had never breathed properly before, and, panting, pulled Draco and the little girl up with him. All around him, wild, green-haired heads were emerging out of the water with him, but they were smiling at him.

The crowd in the stands was making a great deal of noise; shouting and screaming, they all seemed to be on their feet; Harry had the impression they thought that Draco and the little girl might be dead, but they were wrong…both of them had opened their eyes; the girl looked scared and confused, but Draco merely spat out a great mouthful of water, squinting in the bright light, and wrinkled his nose with annoyance. “Eugh,” he said, “this is even more unpleasant than I expected when Snape explained…” His voice trailed off as he spotted Fleur’s sister. “What’s she doing here?” he asked, beginning to shiver. “Don’t tell me you brought her up with you?”

“Fleur didn’t turn up, I couldn’t leave her,” Harry panted.

“Of course you could have!” Draco said, outraged. “That was the whole point, you idiot!”

“But the song said—”

“I know what the song said! Don’t tell me you were such a moron that you thought it actually meant they would let us—I don’t know, let us die or something if one of you didn’t make it there in time?” He shook his head, sending his wet hair flopping, and said scathingly, “Of course you did. Well I just hope you didn’t waste too much time acting the hero, you imbecile!”

Harry felt both stupid and annoyed. It was all very well for Draco; _he’d_ been asleep, he hadn’t felt how eerie it was down in the lake, surrounded by spear-carrying merpeople who’d looked more than capable of murder.

“C’mon,” Harry said shortly, “help me with her, I don’t think she can swim very well.”

“I don’t see where that’s our problem,” Draco sneered, but he was already reaching for the girl’s other arm as he spoke. He said something in French to her that Harry couldn’t understand, but which made her smile shyly at them both.

They pulled Fleur’s sister though the water, back toward the bank where the judges stood watching, twenty merpeople accompanying them like a guard of honor, singing their horribly screechy song.

Harry could see Madam Pomfrey fussing over Hermione, Krum, Cedric, and Cho, all of whom were wrapped in thick blankets. Dumbledore and Ludo Bagman stood beaming at Harry and Draco from the bank as they swam nearer, but Percy, looking pale and relieved, sagged back in his seat as though released from a terrible burden. Meanwhile Madame Maxime was trying to restrain Fleur Delacour, who was quite hysterical, fighting tooth and nail to return to the water.

“Gabrielle! _Gabrielle! Is she alive? Is she ‘urt?”_

“She’s fine!” Harry tried to tell her, but he was so exhausted he could hardly talk, let alone shout.

“Emotional thing, isn’t she?” Draco muttered to Harry. “Do you think she bought into that dumb song the way you did?”

He snickered, but Harry ignored him; they had finally reached the bank; Dumbledore and Bagman were pulling Harry upright; Fleur had broken free of Madame Maxime and was hugging her sister.

“It was ze grindelows…zey attacked me…oh Gabrielle, I thought…I thought…”

“Come here, you,” said Madam Pomfrey. She seized Harry and pulled him over to Hermione and the others, wrapped him so tightly in a blanket that he felt as though he were in a straightjacket, and forced a measure of very hot potion down his throat. Steam gushed out of his ears.

“Harry, well done!” Hermione cried. “You did it, we were beginning to get worried! Viktor said you were there already when he got to us, why didn’t you follow right away? Did something happen?”

“Well—” said Harry. He might have been willing to confess his foolishness to Hermione, but he had just noticed Karkaroff watching him. He was the only judge other than Percy who had not left the table; the only judge not showing signs of pleasure and relief that Harry, Draco, and Fleur’s sister had got back safely. “No, nothing important,” he said, giving Karkaroff a glare. Nearer to the bank, Draco was still arguing with Madam Pomfrey, not wanting to drink any potion that would make him smoke at the ears even though he was shivering violently in his blanket.

“You haff a water beetle in your hair, Herm-own-ninny,” said Krum. Harry had the impression that Krum was drawing her attention back onto himself; perhaps to remind her that he had just rescued her from the lake, but Hermione brushed away the beetle impatiently and said, “You’re well outside the time limit, though, Harry…. Did you have trouble finding your way back to shore?”

Harry’s feeling of stupidity was growing. Now he was out of the water, it seemed perfectly clear that Dumbledore’s safety precautions wouldn’t have permitted the death of a hostage just because their champion hadn’t turned up. Why hadn’t he just grabbed Draco and gone? He would have been first back…. Cedric and Krum hadn’t wasted time worrying about anyone else; they hadn’t taken the mersong seriously….

Dumbledore was crouching at the water’s edge, deep in conversation with what seemed to be the chief merperson, a particularly wily and ferocious-looking female. He was making the same sort of screechy noises that the merpeople made when they were above the water; clearly, Dumbledore could speak Mermish. Finally he straightened up, turned to his fellow judges, and said, “A conference before we give the marks, I think.”

The judges went into a huddle. Madam Pomfrey finished fussing with Draco and he, having finally been bullied into drinking his dose of Pepperup Potion, grumpily joined the others, smoke pouring out of his ears. Madam Pomfrey went to fetch Fleur and her sister. Fleur had many cuts on her face and arms and her robes were torn, but she didn’t seem to care, nor would she allow Madam Pomfrey to clean them.

“Look after Gabrielle,” she told her, and then she turned to Harry. “You saved ‘er,” she said breathlessly. “Even though she was not your ‘ostage.”

“Yeah,” said Harry, who was now heartily wishing he’d left all three girls tied to the statue.

Fleur bent down, kissed Harry twice on each cheek (he felt his face burn and wouldn’t have been surprised it steam was coming out of his ears again), then said to Draco, “And you too—you ‘helped—”

“I—I suppose so,” Draco said, edging backwards uncertainly.

Fleur swooped down on him too and kissed him. Hermione looked like she might burst out laughing at the bewildered expression on Draco’s face, but just then, Ludo Bagman’s magically magnified voice boomed out beside them, making them all jump, and causing the crowd in the stands to go very quiet.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached our decision. Merchieftainess Murcus has told us exactly what happened at the bottom of the lake, and we have therefore decided to award marks out of fifty for each of the champions, as follows….

“Fleur Delacour, though she demonstrated excellent use of the Bubble-Head Charm, was attacked by grindylows as she approached her goal, and failed to retrieve her hostage. We award her twenty-five points.”

Applause from the stands.

“I deserved zero,” said Fleur throatily, shaking her magnificent head.

“Cedric Diggory, who also used the Bubble-Head Charm, was first to return with his hostage, though he returned one minute outside the time limit of an hour.” Enormous cheers from the Hufflepuffs in the crowd; Harry saw Cho give Cedric a glowing look. “We therefore award him forty-seven points.”

Harry’s heart sank. If Cedric had been outside the time limit, he most certainly had been.

“Viktor Krum used an incomplete form of Transfiguration, which was nevertheless effective, and was second to return with his hostage. We award him forty points.”

Karkaroff clapped particularly hard, looking very superior.

“Harry Potter used gillyweed to great effect,” Bagman continued. “He returned last, and well outside the time limit of an hour. However, the Merchieftainess informs us that Mr. Potter was first to reach the hostages, and that the delay in his return was due to his determination to return all hostages to safety, not merely his own.”

Draco gave him a look that was half-horrified, half-furious. “You did what?” he hissed. Hermione was shaking her head, looking exasperated.

“Most of the judges,” and here, Bagman gave Karkaroff a very nasty look, “feel that this shows moral fiber and merits full marks. However…Mr. Potter’s score is forty-five points.”

Harry’s stomach leapt—he was now tying for first place with _Cedric_. Draco and Hermione, caught by surprise, stared at Harry, then laughed and started applauding hard with the rest of the crowd.

“Moral fiber!” Draco chortled. “They’re calling it _moral fiber_ —oh, that’s too much!”

Fleur was clapping very hard too, but Krum didn’t look happy at all. He attempted to engage Hermione in conversation again, but she was too busy cheering Harry to listen.

“The third and final task will take place at dusk on the twenty-fourth of June,” continued Bagman. “The champions will be notified of what is coming precisely one month beforehand. Thank you all for your support of the champions.”

It was over, Harry thought dazedly, as Madam Pomfrey began herding the champions and hostages back to the castle to get into dry clothes…it was over, he had got through…he didn’t have to worry about anything now until June the twenty-fourth….

Next time one of his friends needed help with their homework, Harry decided magnanimously as he walked back up the stone steps into the castle, he wouldn’t hesitate to offer, no matter what subject it was for.


	24. Padfoot Returns

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This section contains a number of very fragmented, heavily-amended excerpts from Chapter Twenty-Seven, stretching from page 509 to 534 of the American hardcover edition.

One of the best things about the aftermath of the second task was that everybody was very keen to hear details of what had happened down in the lake, which meant that Draco wasn’t having to go out of his way to get a share of Harry’s limelight. (He was also too preoccupied to constantly tease Harry about his “moral fiber,” although he laughed every time someone else brought it up.) Harry noticed that Draco’s version of events changed subtly with every retelling. At first, he gave what seemed to be the truth: Adelaide Essex had delivered him to Professor Snape’s office, where Snape had explained that it would all be perfectly safe, and that he would awake when they were all back above the water, before taking Draco to Dumbledore, who had put all the hostages into a bewitched sleep and handed them over to the merpeople. One week later, however, Draco was telling a thrilling tale of his captivity, awake and fighting against the merpeople who had the four hostages under their underwater guard.

“It’s a good thing Potter showed up when he did,” Draco boasted as the class trooped back inside after their Care of Magical Creatures lesson, Pansy hanging breathlessly off his arm. “I’d just disarmed the merchieftainess and had my wand at her throat, and was trying to pantomime that they needed to let us all go at once, or else I’d be forced to do something drastic—”

“Like what, snore at them?” said Hermione waspishly. People had been teasing her so much about being the thing that Viktor Krum would most miss that she was in a rather tetchy mood.

Draco gave her a withering look, which Pansy echoed, and the Slytherins swept into the Great Hall and away from the Gryffindors without another word. It wasn’t until Adrian Pucey pointed out that if Draco had freed all the hostages before Harry got there, then there would have been no reason for the two of them to hang around waiting for the other three champions unless Draco had been suffering from the same “moral fiber” that had afflicted Harry, that he reverted to the bewitched sleep version of events. Apparently being a helpless hostage was better than being the sort of idiot who risked losing a tournament in order to save other people’s friends.

Harry was a little disappointed; he had been enjoying Draco’s increasingly outlandish stories.

As they entered March the weather became drier, but cruel winds skinned their hands and faces every time they went out onto the grounds. There were delays in the post because the owls kept being blown off course. The brown owl that Harry had sent to Sirius with the dates of the Hogsmeade weekend turned up at breakfast on Friday morning with half its feathers sticking up the wrong way; Harry had no sooner torn off Sirius’s reply than it took flight, clearly afraid it was going to be sent outside again.

Sirius’s letter was almost as short as the previous one.

> _Be at stile at end of road out of Hogsmeade (past Dervish and Banges) at two o’clock on Saturday afternoon. Bring as much food as you can._

“I bet _he_ knows what food’s made of, and eats it anyway,” Crabbe grumbled, glaring at Goyle. Goyle was still avoiding eating anything that he understood had once been a living animal, much to Crabbe’s disgruntlement.

“Guess he wants a face-to-face, huh?” mused Draco. “I wonder what he has to say that he can’t put in a letter.”

“I can’t believe him,” said Harry tensely, “if he’s caught…”

“He ought to just give himself up,” Draco said. “Father says the whole retrial process would go much faster if the Ministry was forced to take action, and actually _having_ Sirius back in their custody would leave them little further excuses for dallying….”

Harry folded up the letter, thinking. If he was honest with himself, he really wanted to see Sirius again. He therefore took a while to notice that many of the people eating lunch at the Slytherin table seemed to be giggling more than usual. He looked around for the source of the commotion and was unsurprised to find it stemming from Pansy Parkinson who, along with Daphne, Millicent, Lilian, and Tracey, was bent over a magazine. They kept looking up from it, glancing down the side of the table toward where Viktor Krum was sitting with some of the other students from Durmstrang, and then ducking back down and sniggering heartily.

“What’s going on?” Harry asked Draco, whispering so that Pansy wouldn’t hear him.

“I don’t know,” said Draco, looking up from his Potions textbook. “Let’s find out.”

Before Harry could stop him, he had leaned across the table and snatched the magazine out of Pansy’s hands with a belated, “Mind if I borrow that?”

Daphne and Tracey looked offended, but Pansy, nodding heartily, just laughed harder.

Draco shoved his book back into his bag and spread the magazine out on the table in front of him and Harry. The title on the front page read _Witch Weekly_ and the moving picture below showed a curly-haired witch who was smiling toothily and pointing at a large sponge cake with her wand.

“What could possibly be so interesting in here?” Draco said. It was a rhetorical question; he was already flipping through the glossy pages. At last, in the center pages, he found what had to be inspiring everyone’s giggles. A color photograph of Harry headed a short piece entitled:

> **HARRY POTTER’S SECRET HEARTACHE**
> 
> A boy like no other, perhaps—yet a boy suffering all the usual pangs of adolescence, _writes Rita Skeeter_. Deprived of love since the tragic demise of his parents, fourteen-year-old Harry Potter thought he had found solace in his steady girlfriend at Hogwarts, Muggle-born Hermione Granger. Little did he know that he would shortly be suffering yet another emotional blow in a life already littered with personal loss.
> 
> Miss Granger, a plain but ambitious girl, seems to have a taste for famous wizards that Harry alone cannot satisfy. Since the arrival at Hogwarts of Viktor Krum, Bulgarian Seeker and hero of the last World Quidditch Cup, Miss Granger has been toying with both boys’ affections. Krum, who is openly smitten with the devious Miss Granger, has already invited her to visit him in Bulgarian over the summer holidays, and insists that he had “never felt this way about any other girl.”
> 
> However, it might not be Miss Granger’s doubtful natural charms that have captured these unfortunate boys’ interest.
> 
>  “She’s really clever, the top of our class in pretty much everything. Yes, I’m sure she’d be more than capable of brewing up a love potion if she wanted to,” related Parvati Patil, a pretty girl who shares a dormitory with Miss Granger. Lavender Brown, another fourth-year student, confirmed that, “She doesn’t have many friends, mostly she hangs out with the boys, and I’m not even sure that all of them like her,” words which must cause one to wonder how many other young wizards may have had their feelings artificially stimulated by the overly-intelligent Miss Granger.
> 
> Love Potions are, of course, banned at Hogwarts, and no doubt Albus Dumbledore will want to investigate these claims. In the meantime, Harry Potter’s well-wishers must hope that, next time, he bestows his heart on a worthier candidate.

Draco—who was a faster reader than anyone in their class other than Theodore Nott—burst out laughing before Harry, his stomach sinking with each word, finished the last paragraph. Rita Skeeter’s conclusion didn’t make him feel any better when he read it. “What…what is this?” he said, staring at the article in horror.

“An excellent question!” said Draco, still chortling. “Parkinson! What is this rubbish?”

“The latest issue of _Witch Weekly_ , of course,” Pansy replied sweetly. “Don’t you like it?”

“You mean as a joke, or as a means of inducing vomiting?”

Harry leaned over to Draco and said quietly, “Is _Witch Weekly_ a—er—a popular magazine?”

“Pretty popular,” Draco said, shrugging. “I mean, I wouldn’t rank it with, like, _Which Broomstick_ , but….”

“Great,” said Harry. He could feel his face burning. “That’s terrific.”

He looked over his shoulder at the Gryffindor table, but he couldn’t spot Hermione through the crowds of Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs sitting between them. He wondered if she had seen the article yet. He wondered what she would think of it, when she did.

“Aren’t you supposed to be my publicist now?” Harry asked Draco, only half-joking. “Shouldn’t you be taking care of things like this?”

Draco snorted. “And if Skeeter had asked _me_ for a quote for her article, I would have—but she didn’t. Probably because she knows we’re friends, so I’d tell her the truth, and that’s not what she was after.”

Harry shook his head. “This all started with Colin Creevey, you know,” he said. “Shows what happens, when you sign somebody’s stupid photo…. Next thing you know, they think they know you and they’re making up stories to the newspapers….”

“When you what?” Draco asked.

“Forget it,” Harry said quickly. “Let’s just get to class—and get this over with.”

Their final lesson of the afternoon was double Potions, a class which Harry had never approached with as much enthusiasm as Draco. Today, however, he felt like he might as well be walking back into the lake. He trudged down the steps to the dungeons, trying to ignore Pansy and her friends who were still giggling. The door of the Potions classroom was closed when they reached it, so the Slytherins milled about in the hallway, waiting for Snape.

The Gryffindors showed up first, Hermione Granger chattering to a bored-looking Ron Weasley and a nervous Neville Longbottom. All three of them were wearing S.P.E.W. badges, although Longbottom had tried to hide his under the strap of his bag.

Pansy, Daphne, and the other girls shrieked with renewed laughter when they spotted Hermione. “There they are, there they are!” Pansy giggled. Harry glared at Pansy, but she ignored him, grinning broadly at Hermione instead. “You might find something to interest you in there, Granger!” Pansy said loudly, and she threw the magazine to Hermione, who caught it, looking startled. At that moment, the dungeon door opened, and Professor Snape beckoned them all inside.

Draco took his usual table in front of Snape’s desk, and Harry followed him, but he kept looking over his shoulder. “How’s _that_ for Durmstrang standards?” Pansy cooed viciously as she walked past, and Draco chuckled. Harry ignored her. He caught Hermione’s sleeve as she started to walk past, carrying the magazine, and hissed, “I had nothing to do with it—I promise!”

Hermione looked at him in confusion and took a seat at the table behind Harry’s. “What is it?” she whispered, but just then Professor Snape started to tell them about their assignment for the day, so Harry shook his head and turned around to face the front of the classroom again.

Once Snape had turned his back on them to write up the ingredients of today’s potion on the blackboard, Harry caught the sound of glossy pages flicking back and forth quickly, and knew that Hermione must be looking through the magazine under her desk. He closed his eyes, wincing, and waited.

For a few minutes there was silence, aside from Snape’s chalk scratching across the board; then Harry heard Ron Weasley whisper, “I told you!” from the seat next to Hermione’s. “I _told_ you not to annoy Rita Skeeter! She’s made you out to be some sort of—of scarlet woman!”

Harry couldn’t help it; he turned around to stare at Ron. Hermione looked amused as well, snorting with laughter. _“Scarlet woman?”_ she repeated, shaking with suppressed giggles as she looked around at Ron.

“It’s what my mum calls them,” Ron muttered, his ears going red.

“My gran usually says harlots,” Neville whispered, from the seat on Ron’s other side.

“If that’s the best Rita can do, she’s losing her touch,” said Hermione, still giggling, as she threw _Witch Weekly_ onto the empty chair beside her. “What a pile of old rubbish.”

She looked over at Pansy, Daphne, and Millicent, who were all watching her from across the room to see if she had been upset by the article. Hermione gave them a sarcastic smile and a wave and started unpacking the ingredients she would need for her Wit-Sharpening Potion. Harry breathed a heavy sigh of relief and turned around to help Draco begin work on their own draught.

Roughly ten minutes later, Harry heard another whisper behind him, and turned to see Hermione holding her pestle suspended over a bowl of scarab beetles. “How could Rita Skeeter have known…?”

“Known what?” said Ron quickly. “You _haven’t_ been mixing up Love Potions, have you?”

Draco had noticed them whispering as well; he turned around and sneered, “Why, you hoping she’ll loan you a bottle the next time you have to ask somebody to a dance?”

Ron glowered at Draco and Harry had to stuff his sleeve into his mouth to stop himself laughing. Hermione glared at all of them. “Don’t be stupid,” she snapped, starting to pound up her beetles again. “No, it’s just…how did she know Viktor asked me to visit him over the summer?”

Hermione blushed scarlet as she said this and determinedly avoided Ron’s eyes.

“What?” said Ron, dropping his pestle with a loud clunk.

“He asked me right after he’d pulled me out of the lake,” Hermione muttered. “After he’d got rid of his shark’s head. Madam Pomfrey gave us both blankets and then he sort of pulled me away from the judges so they wouldn’t hear, and he said, if I wasn’t doing anything over the summer, would I like to—”

“And what did you say?” said Ron, who had picked up his pestle and was grinding it on the desk, a good six inches from his bowl, because he was looking at Hermione.

“And he _did_ say he’d never felt the same way about anyone else,” Hermione went on, going so red now that Harry could almost feel the heat coming from her all the way across the table, “but how could Rita Skeeter have heard him? She wasn’t there…or was she?” Hermione’s eyes flicked toward Harry and Draco and she raised an eyebrow. “She might have an Invisibility Cloak, I suppose; maybe she sneaked onto the grounds to watch the second task. She wouldn’t be the only one running around with one of those, would she?”.

Harry shrugged sheepishly; Draco smirked and mouthed, “Jealous?”

“And what did you say?” Ron repeated, pounding his pestle down so hard that it dented the desk.

“Well, I was too busy seeing whether Harry was okay to—”

“Fascinating though your social life undoubtedly is, Miss Granger,” said an icy voice right behind them, and all four of them jumped—even Draco— “I must ask you not to discuss it in my class. Ten points from Gryffindor.”

Professor Snape had glided over to their desk while they were talking. The whole class was now looking around at them. “Ha!” said Draco. Harry kicked him in the ankle, worried that Professor Snape would take points from Slytherin next, momentarily forgetting that he _never_ took points from Draco for talking in class.

“Ah…reading magazines under the table as well?” Snape added, snatching up the copy of _Witch Weekly_. “I admit, I would expect this sort of nonsense from Weasley and Longbottom, but I thought more of you, Miss Granger. Perhaps you would do better with more competent brewing partners. Weasley!” he snapped, making Ron jump so hard he almost fell out of his chair. “Go work with Finnigan and Thomas. Longbottom!” Neville _did_ fall out of his chair and he scrambled back to his feet as the class laughed, his round face scarlet. “You will join Crabbe and Goyle here in the front row. And Granger—”

Harry closed his eyes, somehow knowing what was coming.

“Up here with Malfoy and Potter, if you please.”

Draco opened his mouth to protest and Harry kicked him in the ankle again. He didn’t want to annoy Snape under ordinary circumstances, but so close to the completion of the second task, which Harry had only succeeded at thanks to Snape’s generosity, he wanted to be especially polite to show his gratitude. Draco glared at Harry but didn’t say anything as Hermione transferred her cauldron and ingredients up to their table. Her face was very pink.

Professor Snape stared at them for several minutes and Harry hurriedly resumed the mashing of his scarab beetles, trying to look like a desire to gossip was the last thing on his mind.

Eventually Snape turned away again, but to Harry’s dismay, what he turned his attention to was the magazine in his hands. It was still folded open to Rita Skeeter’s article. Harry, forgetting about his beetles and continuing to mash them well beyond the point at which they were nothing more than a very fine powder, watched as Snape’s black eyes narrowed to jet pinpricks, darting back and forth rapidly as he read the article.

His eyes snapped back up, fixing on Harry’s face, and Harry gulped and quickly moved to tip the powdered beetles into his cauldron. He started cutting up his ginger roots. His hands were shaking slightly out of nerves, but he kept his eyes down, trying to pretend that he hadn’t seen what Snape was reading.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw black robes swish past as Snape walked to the front of the room. He looked up, along with the rest of the class, when the Potions Master cleared his throat. His thin face was cold and his eyes glittered unpleasantly.

“Your attention for a moment, students,” Professor Snape said in a soft, dangerous voice. “It appears that there are rumors going around this school regarding the use of love potions by some of the student body. Let me make it perfectly clear: as long as I am Potions Master here, there will be absolutely no such foolishness within this castle. Should you ever suspect that any of your fellow students have been dosed with such a draught, I strongly suggest that you bring them to me immediately for an antidote.” His eyes lingered on Harry and Hermione, both of whom blushed furiously. “While you may initially find the absurd behavior of those under the influence of a love potion amusing, I caution you against treating such poisoning as an opportunity for entertainment. Love potions do not actually create love, but merely mimic its effects, and the obsessive infatuations induced by these brews can be… _dangerous_.” Snape’s black eyes flashed. “Any questions?” he asked.

Not even Hermione dared raise her hand.

“Good,” snapped Snape. “Then get back to work.” He threw the copy of _Witch Weekly_ down on his desk and stalked off across the dungeon to torment Weasley, Thomas, and Finnigan.

For a while neither Harry, Draco, nor Hermione spoke.

Harry tipped his ginger roots into his cauldron, glanced over his shoulder (Professor Snape looked occupied, and too far away to overhear), and leaned over so he could whisper to Hermione, “Sorry.”

She jumped, startled, and almost chopped her fingers instead of her ginger root. “What?” she hissed, looking up at Harry, and then over her shoulder for Snape as well.

“I said, I’m sorry!” Harry repeated, as quietly as he could. “It’s my fault that Rita Skeeter was angry with you, I’m the one who started yelling at her….”

Hermione shook her head. “You didn’t make me yell too,” she whispered. “Anyway, she deserved everything I said, and I’m not sorry. She’s a—a _horrible_ woman. And nobody with any brains at all is going to be stupid enough to believe a word she writes,” Hermione added in a louder voice, glancing toward Pansy and Daphne, who broke into fresh giggles when they noticed her looking at them.

Harry nodded, but he still felt responsible. “Hey listen,” he said, dropping his voice even lower, so that Hermione had to lean in across her cauldron to hear him, “Sirius is going to be in Hogsmeade tomorrow. Do you want to come along and see him?”

Draco squawked indignantly and leaned in on Harry’s other side. “What do you want to go inviting _her_ for?” he hissed. “She’ll probably tattle on him to one of the teachers—or the Ministry!”

Hermione glowered at Draco. “In case you’ve forgotten,” she said primly, “I helped Sirius escape, too. I’m not about to go turning him in—”

There was a knock at the dungeon door.

“Enter,” said Snape, striding back to the front of the room.

The class looked around as the door opened. Professor Karkaroff came in. Everyone watched him as he walked up toward Snape’s desk. He was twisting his finger around his goatee and looking agitated.

“We need to talk,” said Karkaroff abruptly when he had reached Snape. He seemed so determined that nobody should hear what he was saying that he was barely opening his lips; it was as though he were a rather poor ventriloquist. Harry kept his eyes on his simmering potion, listening hard.

“I’ll talk to you after my lesson, Karkaroff,” Snape muttered, but Karkaroff interrupted him.

“I want to talk now, while you can’t slip off, Severus. You’ve been avoiding me.”

“After the lesson,” Snape snapped.

Under the pretext of holding up a measuring cup to see if he’d poured out enough armadillo bile, Harry sneaked a sidelong glance at the pair of them. Karkaroff looked extremely worried, and Snape looked angry.

Karkaroff hovered behind Snape’s desk for the rest of the double period. He seemed intent on preventing Snape from slipping away at the end of class. With both teachers now stationed right in front of them at Snape’s desk, Harry and his friends could no longer risk talking, but Draco and Hermione continued to shoot glares at one another across Harry’s cauldron for the remainder of the lesson.

Keen to hear what Karkaroff wanted to say, Harry deliberately knocked over his bottle of armadillo bile with two minutes to go to the bell, which gave him an excuse to duck down behind his cauldron and mop up while the rest of the class moved noisily toward the door.

“What’s so urgent?” he heard Snape hiss at Karkaroff.

_“This,”_ said Karkaroff, and Harry, peering around the edge of his cauldron, saw Karkaroff pull up the left-hand sleeve of his robe and show Snape something on his inner forearm.

“Well?” said Karkaroff, still making every effort not to move his lips. “Do you see? It’s never been this clear, never since—”

“Put it away!” snarled Snape, his black eyes sweeping the classroom.

“But you must have noticed—” Karkaroff began in an agitated voice.

“We can talk later, Karkaroff!” spat Snape. “Potter! What are you doing?”

“Cleaning up my armadillo bile, Professor,” said Harry innocently, straightening up and showing Snape the sodden rag he was holding.

Karkaroff turned on his heel and strode out of the dungeon. He looked both worried and angry. Knowing he had pushed his luck, Harry threw his books and ingredients back into his bag and left at top speed to tell his friends what he had just witnessed.

When he walked out of the classroom, he found both Draco and Hermione still in the hallway outside, apparently in the middle of an argument.

“—just go around tattling on everything!”

“Oh, like you did when you got Harry’s broom confiscated to give Gryffindor an edge in Quidditch? Or how about the time you—”

“Hey!” Harry said, scowling, and they both spun around to face him. Hermione’s cheeks were very pink and Draco’s eyes had turned so icy they practically glittered in the low torchlight. “Hurry up, I have to tell you something!” Harry led the way up the stairs away from the Potions classroom. He looked over his shoulder, but there was no sign of Snape following him.

“Well?” Draco demanded. “What is it?”

Harry told them what Karkaroff had said, and done, as they climbed toward the Great Hall.

“What do you think he was talking about?” Hermione asked.

“Dunno,” said Harry. He turned to Draco, who had been oddly quiet throughout Harry’s story. “Any ideas?” he asked.

“Er—no,” Draco said, shaking his head furiously, “nothing. Sorry.”

“Do you think it could have anything to do with why Moody was searching Snape’s office?”

“Why Moody was what?” Hermione gasped.

Harry filled her in on the events of last month’s visit to the prefect’s bathroom as quickly as possible, doing his best to make it sound like he had had permission to be wandering the halls after curfew without actually lying about it. Fortunately Hermione was too interested in why Moody would be violating the sanctity of another teacher’s office to scold Harry for his own rule-breaking.

“Well, if Moody doesn’t trust Karkaroff, and he knows that Karkaroff has been trying to talk to Snape, maybe he was in there hoping to…to catch Karkaroff doing something he shouldn’t?” Hermione ventured tentatively. “Like breaking into a Hogwarts teacher’s office, for instance?”

Harry frowned, but before he could say anything else they crossed the threshold into the entrance hall, where Parvati Patil and Lavender Brown were waiting for them—or were waiting for Hermione, anyway.

Lavender launched into speech the moment she spotted Hermione: “We’re so sorry, Hermione!” Her eyes looked puffy, and her fingers were laced together tightly in front of her chest, making her looks like she was in the middle of praying for something important. “We didn’t know!”

“Yeah,” Parvati said, “Rita Skeeter just said she wanted to interview us about the tournament for _Witch Weekly_ , she didn’t say it was going to be an article about you!”

“Yeah,” Lavender chimed in again, not giving anyone else a chance to speak, “and then she started asking us about different students in Potter’s year, to ‘add color,’ she said, and she’s the one who brought up love potions, Parvati was just agreeing that you were smart enough that you could have made one if you’d wanted—”

“Never mind,” Hermione said quickly, raising her hands placatingly and cutting the other Gryffindor girls off. “I don’t care, it’s all just stupid. It’s _fine.”_ She rolled her eyes at Harry and let Parvati and Lavender pull her away to the Gryffindor table, both of them continuing to babble excuses until they were out of hearing.

Harry expected Draco to burst out laughing again, but his friend had an oddly preoccupied expression on his pointed face, and he said nothing as they joined the others at the Slytherin table. Pansy barely waited for them to sit down before she exclaimed, “Well? Did she cry? Was she angry? What’d she say?”

“Who, Hermione?” said Harry. He shook his head. “No—annoyed, yeah.” He frowned at Pansy. “So am I, for that matter. But she didn’t _cry.”_ His frown deepened and he added, “I may not be an international Quidditch player, but it’s not like I’m _horrible_ , either. I expect there are loads of girls who wouldn’t cry over the idea of maybe dating me.”

That, unfortunately, sent Pansy, Daphne, Tracey, and Millicent all into gales of laughter. Harry glared at the girls, but that only made them laugh harder, and his attempts to explain what he had meant only made things worse. Crabbe and Goyle were little help, of course; whenever there was food on the table, they lost interest in anything else. Harry should have been able to count on Draco to say something scathing to shut the girls up, but he was busy writing a letter to his parents, and barely seemed to notice anything else happening at the table. Harry grumbled under his breath and did his best to ignore them all for the rest of the night.

Harry, Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle left the castle at noon the next day to find a weak silver sun shining down upon the grounds. The weather was milder than it had been all year, and by the time they arrived in Hogsmeade, all four of them had taken off their cloaks and thrown them over their shoulders. The food Sirius had told them to bring was in Harry’s bag; he had sneaked a dozen chicken legs, a loaf of bread, and a flask of pumpkin juice from the lunch table. Crabbe and Goyle were carrying more food, having both been appalled by the idea that Sirius might be hungry, but Harry was under no illusions that everything in their bags would make it to their destination. Draco wasn’t carrying anything; he had spent the morning vacillating between whether or not he wanted to risk making himself an accessory to Sirius’s crimes by meeting with him, and while he had ultimately been unable to pass up going along, he refused to make things any worse for himself by “actively aiding and abetting,” as he put it.

Harry would have suspected Draco of simply being lazy if he hadn’t been fidgeting nervously for the whole walk to the village, and glancing backwards over his shoulder every three steps.

They went into the Three Broomsticks to start with because Crabbe refused to pass-up the opportunity for a butterbeer. Harry decided to buy a few extra bottles to take along to Sirius and squeezed them into his bag of supplies. Then, at half past one, they made their way up the High Street, past Dervish and Banges, and out toward the edge of the village.

Hermione was waiting for them, and she had Ron Weasley with her.

Harry and the other Slytherins stopped dead.

“What’s _he_ doing here?” Draco asked, pointing accusingly at Ron, whose freckled face reddened.

Hermione raised her chin defiantly. “I invited him to come along,” she said. “He wanted to meet Sirius so that he could apologize for Pettigrew in person. You don’t mind, do you, Harry?” she asked lightly.

Harry, who was still feeling guilty that he had brought Hermione to Rita Skeeter’s unkind attention, shook his head. “It’s fine,” he said, ignoring the dark glower that Draco shot his way.

The six of them fell into step together, Hermione chattering determinedly although the others mostly replied in terse grunts. Eventually she gave up, and they walked in uncomfortable silence.

Harry had never been in this direction before. The winding lane was leading them out into the wild countryside around Hogsmeade. The cottages were fewer here, and their gardens larger; they were walking toward the foot of the mountain in whose shadow Hogsmeade lay. Then they turned a corner and saw a stile at the end of the lane. Waiting for them, its front paws on the topmost bar, was a very large, shaggy black dog, which was carrying some newspapers in its mouth and looking very familiar…

“Hello, Sirius,” said Harry when they had reached him.

The black dog sniffed the bags with the food eagerly, wagged its tail once, then turned and began to trot away from them across the scrubby patch of ground that rose to meet the rocky foot of the mountain. Harry and the others climbed over the stile and followed.

Sirius led them to the very foot of the mountain, where the ground was covered with boulders and rocks. It was easy for him, with his four paws, but Harry and the others were soon out of breath. They followed Sirius higher, up onto the mountain itself. For nearly half an hour they climbed a steep, winding, and stony path, following Sirius’s wagging tail, sweating in the sun, the shoulder straps of Harry’s bag cutting into his shoulders. If Crabbe or Goyle were similarly inconvenienced, they said nothing; Harry wasn’t sure if that was because they were so much stronger than him that they didn’t notice the weight, whether they had eaten so much of the food already that their bags were lighter, or simply because the thought of complaining about too much food would never occur to them.

“You know we’re accessories now,” Hermione whispered, in a worried voice.

“You can always go back if that bothers you,” Draco said, as if he hadn’t been fretting about the same thing earlier.

Harry scowled at them. “You can both go back if you’re worried,” he said shortly. “I’m not afraid of the Ministry. I’ll go alone, I don’t care.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Hermione hastened to reassure Harry. “I was just….”

But whatever she had meant, she didn’t say. They continued to climb in silence, save for their panting.

Then, at last, Sirius slipped out of sight, and when they reached the place where he had vanished, they saw a narrow fissure in the rock. They squeezed into it and found themselves in a cool, dimly lit cave. An extremely shabby broomstick leaned forlornly against one wall. Crabbe and Goyle gaped at the jagged rock walls, and Crabbe immediately went over to a stalagmite and tried to kick it loose from the floor. Harry, however, was looking at the black dog, which had just turned into his godfather.

Sirius was wearing ragged gray robes; the same ones he had been wearing when he had left Azkaban. His black hair was longer than it had been when he had appeared in the fire, and it was untidy and matted once more. He looked very thin.

“Chicken!” he said hoarsely after removing the old _Daily Prophets_ from his mouth and throwing them down onto the cave floor.

Goyle opened his mouth but Draco trod on his foot before he could say anything. Harry pulled open his bag and handed over the bundle of chicken legs and bread.

“Thanks,” said Sirius, opening it, grabbing a drumstick, sitting down on the cave floor, and tearing off a large chunk with his teeth. “I’ve been living off rats mostly. Can’t steal too much food from Hogsmeade; I’d draw attention to myself.”

He grinned up at Harry, but Harry returned the grin only reluctantly.

“Living off rats?” Draco was looking askance at Sirius. “Have you…have you not got a wand?” he asked in a small voice, as though he were embarrassed even to be voicing the         question.

Sirius turned to stare at him; so did the others. “Where would I get a wand?” Sirius asked, with a bark of laughter.

Draco shuddered, going pale, and turned away.

Sirius resumed masticating his chicken leg.

Ron coughed hesitantly, and Sirius’s gray eyes darted toward where he and Hermione were hovering near the cave entrance. “Who’s this?” Sirius asked, his smile vanishing.

“Er—” Harry began, but Ron was walking forward, his shoulders hunched.

“Ron Weasley,” he said. “It was my rat—I mean, Pettigrew, he was my rat. Well, my brother’s rat, really, but Percy gave him to me, and….” Ron swallowed hard, his freckles stark against the sickly pallor of his cheeks. “Anyway, I wanted to apologize. For not—you know…doing something. About him. The rat, I mean. Pettigrew.” His voice grew louder, rougher, with each word until he spoke the last three words in a shout. “If I’d known what he was—what he’d done—I’d have killed him myself, I swear it!”

His face now bright red, Ron fell silent, staring at his feet.

Sirius, to everyone’s surprise, started to laugh.

“Nice to meet you, Ron,” he said. He wiped his greasy hand off on his robes before holding it out toward Ron. His robes were so filthy that this probably only made his hand dirtier, but Ron didn’t seem bothered; on the contrary, he seized Sirius’s hand and shook it with both of his. The sense of relief rising off of the tall ginger wizard was so strong that it was nearly palpable.

“Tell you what,” Sirius said, still chuckling, “if you’re there when I finally get my hands on Peter, I’ll let you hold him down while I do the deed. Fair enough?”

Ron jerked his head in a nod. “Yeah,” he said. “I reckon he owes you more than he does me, anyway.”

Sirius grinned and returned his attention to his chicken leg.

Harry frowned. “What are you doing here, Sirius?” he said.

“Fulfilling my duties as godfather,” said Sirius, gnawing on the chicken bone in a very doglike way. “Don’t worry about it, I’m pretending to be a loveably stray.”

“And if somebody recognizes you?” Draco asked, his voice pointed. “It’s not like your condition as an Animagus is a secret anymore.”

“True,” said Sirius, shrugging, “but nobody is looking for me around here. Who’s going to suspect that the mutt in the gutter is notorious criminal Sirius Black? Nobody looks twice at a stray dog begging for scraps.”

He was still grinning, but seeing the anxiety in Harry’s face, said more seriously, “I want to be on the spot. Your last letter…well, let’s just say things are getting fishier. I’ve been stealing the paper every time someone throws one out, and by the looks of things, I’m not the only one who’s getting worried.”

He nodded at the yellowing _Daily Prophets_ on the cave floor, and Ron—trying to make himself useful—picked them up and unfolded them. Harry, however, continued to stare at Sirius.

“What if they catch you? What if Draco’s right, and someone does recognize you?”

“Well then,” said Sirius, eyeballing his cousin, “I suppose it’ll be time to see just how much sway dear old Lucius actually has with the Ministry. Ought to make him happy, anyway,” Sirius added, shrugging again and beginning to devour his second chicken leg. “He’s been saying I ought to turn myself in for months.”

Harry didn’t know what to say to that; on the one hand, he trusted Mr. Malfoy, but on the other, the idea of Sirius arrested again made his heart race. He scrubbed his hands over his face and looked around for a distraction, settling on the papers Sirius had brought. There were two: The first bore the headline _Mystery Illness of Bartemius Crouch_ , the second, _Ministry Witch Still Missing—Minister of Magic Now Personally Involved._

Harry scanned the story about Crouch. Phrases jumped out at him: _hasn’t been seen in public since November…house appears deserted…St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries decline comment…Ministry refuses to confirm rumors of critical illness…._

Harry passed the papers to Draco, who wrinkled his nose at their filthy condition but didn’t hesitate to pour over the articles, his pale eyes narrowing in the dim light. Hermione walked closer to peer over his shoulder, although she had to stand on her toes to do it.

“Is that more stories about Crouch?” Ron asked, craning his neck to read as well; with his height, he didn’t have any problem looking over both their heads.

“They’re making it sound like he’s dying,” said Harry slowly. “But he can’t be that ill if he managed to get up here….”

 “My brother’s Crouch’s personal assistant,” Ron informed Sirius and the others. “He says Crouch is suffering from overwork.”

“Mind you, he _did_ look ill, last time I saw him up close,” said Harry slowly, thinking back. “The night my name came out of the goblet….”

“Getting his comeuppance for sacking Winky, isn’t he?” said Hermione, an edge to her voice. Draco rolled his eyes so hard his whole head tilted, but she ignored him. “I bet he wishes he hadn’t done it now—bet he feels the difference now she’s not there to look after him.”

“Granger’s gone and fallen in love with house-elves,” Draco sneered to Sirius, casting Hermione a dark look. “She thinks they ought to be _freed.”_ He made a derisive noise in the back of his throat. Sirius, however, looked interested.

“Crouch sacked his house-elf?”

“Yeah, at the Quidditch World Cup,” said Harry, and he launched into the story of the Dark Mark’s appearance, and Winky being found with Harry’s wand clutched in her hand, and Mr. Crouch’s fury. When Harry had finished, Sirius was on his feet again and had started pacing up and down the cave.

“Let me get this straight,” he said after a while, brandishing a fresh chicken leg. “You first saw the elf in the Top Box. She was saving Crouch a seat, right?”

“Right,” said Harry and Draco together.

“But Crouch didn’t turn up for the match?”

“No,” said Harry. “I think he said he’d been too busy.”

Sirius paced all around the cave in silence. Then he said, “Harry, did you check your pockets for your wand after you’d left the Top Box?”

“Erm…” Harry thought hard. “No,” he said finally. “I didn’t need to use it before we got in the forest. And then I put my hand in my pocket, and all that was in there were my Omnioculars.” He stared at Sirius. “Are you saying whoever conjured the Mark stole my wand in the Top Box?”

“It’s possible,” said Sirius.

“Winky didn’t steal that wand!” Hermione insisted.

Draco shuddered violently. “For once, I have to agree with Granger. A house-elf, taking a wizard’s wand? The very idea is….” He shuddered again, and didn’t say what the idea was, but the look on his face made it plain that whatever it was, it wasn’t pleasant.

“The elf wasn’t the only one in the box,” said Sirius, his brow furrowed as he continued to page. “Who else was sitting around you?”

“Loads of people,” said Harry. “Some Bulgarian ministers…Cornelius Fudge…Ron’s family, Hermione…”

“Anyone else?” said Sirius. His eyes flicked to Draco, who was frowning thoughtfully.

“No one,” said Harry.

“Yes there was, there was Ludo Bagman,” Hermione reminded him.

“Oh yeah…”

“How could you forget him?” Draco asked. “He did the match commentary!”

“I don’t know anything about Bagman except that he used to be Beater for the Wimbourne Wasps,” said Sirius, still pacing. “What’s he like?”

“He’s okay,” said Harry. “He keeps offering to help me with the Triwizard Tournament.”

“Does he, now?” said Sirius, frowning more deeply. “I wonder why he’d do that?”

“Um, so Hogwarts will win?” Draco suggested in a withering voice.

“Says he’s taken a liking to me,” said Harry.

“Hmm,” said Sirius, looking thoughtful.

“We saw him in the forest just before the Dark Mark appeared,” Hermione told Sirius. “Remember?” she said to Harry, Ron, and Draco.

“Yeah, but he didn’t stay in the forest, did he?” said Ron. “The moment we told him about the riot, he went off to the campsite.”

“You mean he went _somewhere_ ,” Draco corrected. “Unless you also popped over to the campsite to make sure that was where he’d Disapparated to, and not…well, anywhere else?”

“Come off it,” said Ron incredulously. “Are you saying you reckon Ludo Bagman conjured the Dark Mark?”

“Of course not,” Draco sneered. “I’m just making sure you get your facts straight. You don’t want to go stating assumptions like they’re certain, not if you don’t know.”

“It’s more likely he did it than Winky,” said Hermione stubbornly.

“Would you shut-up about the stupid house-elf, Granger?” said Draco. Ron looked like he would very much have liked to agree, were it not for the furious way Hermione was now scowling. “No proper witch ought to—”

But Sirius held up a hand to silence Draco.

“When the Dark Mark had been conjured, and the elf had been discovered holding Harry’s wand, what did Crouch do?”

“Went to look in the bushes,” said Harry, “but there wasn’t anyone else there.”

“Of course he looked,” said Draco, “he’d have wanted to pin it on anyone other than his own elf. He tried hard enough to pin it on us, didn’t he?”

Sirius nodded his agreement, pacing up and down again. “And then he sacked her?”

“Yes,” said Hermione in a heated voice, “he sacked her, just because she hadn’t stayed in her tent and let herself get trampled—”

“Hermione, will you give it a rest with the elf!” said Ron.

Sirius shook his head and said, “She’s got the measure of Crouch better than either of you. If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Draco muttered, rolling his eyes upward. “What is it all of a sudden with everybody moaning on about house-elves? No wonder you got burned off mother’s family tree….”

Sirius ran a hand over his unshaven face, evidently thinking hard. He didn’t appear to have heard Draco.

“All these absences of Barty Crouch’s…he goes to the trouble of making sure his house-elf saves him a seat at the Quidditch World Cup, but doesn’t bother to turn up and watch. He works very hard to reinstate the Triwizard Tournament, and then stops coming to that too…. It’s not like Crouch. If he’s ever taken a day off work because of illness before this, I’ll hand myself to the dementors.”

“D’you know Crouch, then?” said Harry.

Sirius’s face darkened. He suddenly looked as menacing as he had the night when Harry first met him, the night when Harry still believed Sirius to be a murderer.

“Oh I know Crouch all right,” he said quietly. “He was the one who gave the order for me to be sent to Azkaban—without a trial.”

_“What?”_ said Ron and Hermione together.

“You’re kidding!” said Harry.

Draco alone didn’t look surprised—well, Draco and Crabbe and Goyle, both of whom were more interested in Crabbe’s stalagmite than in the conversation going on beside them.

“No, I’m not,” said Sirius, taking another great bite of chicken. “Crouch used to be Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, didn’t you know?”

Harry, Ron, and Hermione shook their heads, but Draco nodded. “I think father mentioned something about that,” he said, “something about how Crouch’s record made it harder to get your case reopened….”

“He was tipped for the next Minister of Magic,” said Sirius. “He’s a great wizard, Barty Crouch, powerfully magical—and power-hungry. Oh never a Voldemort supporter,” he said, reading the look on Harry’s face, as the others flinched. “No, Barty Crouch was always very outspoken against the Dark Side. But then a lot of people who were against the Dark Side….” He shot another glance at his cousin, who stared back at him through narrowed eyes. “Well, you wouldn’t understand…you’re too young….”

“That’s what my dad told us at the World Cup when the Death Eaters showed-up,” said Ron, with a trace of irritation in his voice. “Try us, why don’t you?”

A grin flashed across Sirius’s thin face.

“All right, I’ll try you….” He walked once up the cave, back again, and then said, “Imagine that Voldemort’s powerful now.” Draco squeaked and Ron winced; Crabbe and Goyle looked up from their stalagmite, their jaws hanging open, but Harry waved for them to be quiet; he wanted to hear what Sirius was going to say. “You don’t know who his supporters are, you don’t know who’s working for him and who isn’t; you know he can control people so that they do terrible things without being able to stop themselves.”

“Right,” Draco said, in a rushed voice, “that’s what happened to my parents, of course, that’s why they were accused of….”

He fell silent at the look on Sirius’s face. He stared hard at Draco, then started walking again. “You’re scared for yourself, and your family, and your friends. Every week, news comes of more deaths, more disappearances, more torturing…the Ministry of Magic’s in disarray, they don’t know what to do, they’re trying to keep everything hidden from the Muggles, but meanwhile, Muggles are dying too. Terror everywhere…panic…confusion…that’s how it used to be.

“Well, times like that bring out the best in some people and the worst in others. Crouch’s principles might’ve been good in the beginning—I wouldn’t know. He rose quickly through the Ministry, and he started ordering very hard measures against Voldemort’s supporters. The Aurors were given new powers—powers to kill rather than capture, for instance—”

“Moody told us about that in Defense Against the Dark Arts!” Harry interrupted. “He said they were even allowed to use the Unforgivable Curses on people!”

Hermione gasped. “He didn’t tell _our_ class about that,” she said, outraged at having been denied a crucial fact.

Sirius was still talking: “I wasn’t the only one who was handed straight to the dementors without trial. Crouch fought violence with violence, and—yes, Moody told you the truth—he was the one who authorized the use of the Unforgivable Curses against suspects. I would say he became as ruthless and cruel as many on the Dark Side. He had his supporters, mind you—plenty of people thought he was going about things the right way, and there were a lot of witches and wizards clamoring for him to take over as Minister of Magic. When Voldemort disappeared, it looked like only a matter of time until Crouch got the top job. But then something rather unfortunate happened….” Sirius smiled grimly. “Crouch’s own son was caught with a group of Death Eaters who’d managed to talk their way out of Azkaban. Apparently they were trying to find Voldemort and return him to power.”

“Crouch’s _son_ was caught?” gasped Hermione.

“Yep,” said Sirius, glancing from Hermione to Draco before flinging himself down on the ground beside the loaf of bread, and tearing it in half. “Nasty little shock for old Barty, I’d imagine. Should have spent a bit more time at home with his family, shouldn’t he? Ought to have left the office early once in a while…gotten to know his own son.”

He began to wolf down large pieces of bread.

_“Was_ his son a Death Eater?” said Harry.

“No idea,” said Sirius, still stuffing down bread. “I was in Azkaban myself when he was brought in. This is mostly stuff I’ve found out since I got out. The boy was definitely caught in the company of people I’d bet my life were Death Eaters—the Lestranges, Bellatrix and Rodolphus and Rabastan.” Sirius grinned toothily at Draco. “But you’d know more about them than me, wouldn’t you?” he said, something like a challenge in his voice.

Draco raised his chin defiantly. “I don’t see how I could,” he said icily. “I was only a baby when they were arrested. You were the one who grew-up with them.”

Sirius snorted, while Hermione and Ron looked between the two cousins, confused. Harry frowned, remembering something that Dumbledore had told him last year—about Draco’s aunt being in Azkaban—and wondered if she was who Sirius was talking about. He didn’t want to ask, in case he was wrong; he hadn’t been able to work up the nerve to talk about that with Draco, even though he privately thought that being related to a wizarding criminal was still better than being related to the Dursleys….

“Anyway,” Sirius continued, “I’m not sure about Barty; he was in Hufflepuff a few years behind me at school, I never knew him well…so he could have been a Death Eater too, but he might have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, just like the house-elf.”

“Did Crouch try and get his son off?” Hermione whispered.

Sirius let out a laugh that was much more like a bark.

“Crouch let his son off? I thought you had the measure of him, Hermione! Anything that threatened to tarnish his reputation had to go; he had dedicated his whole life to becoming Minister of Magic. You saw him dismiss a devoted house-elf because she associated him with the Dark Mark again—doesn’t that tell you what he’s like? Crouch’s fatherly affection stretched just far enough to give his son a trial, and by all accounts, it wasn’t much more than an excuse for Crouch to show how much he hated the boy…then he sent him straight to Azkaban.”

“He gave his own son to the dementors?” asked Harry quietly.

“That’s right,” said Sirus, and he didn’t look remotely amused now. “I saw the dementors bringing him in, watched them through the bars in my cell door. He can’t have been more than nineteen. They took him into a cell near mine. He was screaming for his mother by nightfall. He went quiet after a few days, though…they all went quiet in the end…except when they shrieked in their sleep….”

For a moment, the deadened look in Sirius’s eyes became more pronounced than ever, as though shutters had closed behind them.

“So he’s still in Azkaban?” Harry said.

“No,” said Sirius dully. “No, he’s not in there anymore. He died about a year after they brought him in.”

“He _died?”_

“He wasn’t the only one,” said Sirius bitterly. “Most go mad in there, and plenty stop eating in the end. They lose the will to live. You could always tell when a death was coming, because the dementors could sense it, they got excited. That boy looked pretty sickly when he arrived. Crouch being an important Ministry member, he and his wife were allowed a deathbed visit. That was the last time I saw Barty Crouch, half carrying his wife past my cell. She died herself, apparently, shortly afterward. Grief. Wasted away just like the boy. Crouch never came for his son’s body. The dementors buried him outside the fortress; I watched them do it.”

Sirius threw aside the bread he had just lifted to his mouth and instead picked up one of the butterbeers Harry had brought for him and drained it.

“So old Crouch lost it all, just when he thought he had it made,” he continued, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “One moment, a hero, poised to become Minister of Magic…next, his son dead, his wife dead, the family name dishonored, and, so I’ve heard since I escaped, a big drop in popularity. Once the boy had died, people started feeling a bit more sympathetic toward the son and started asking how a nice young lad from a good family had gone so badly astray. Not that Crouch’s son was the only one,” Sirius added, with a sharp look over at Crabbe and Goyle, who were still wrestling with the stalagmite. “The conclusion was that his father never cared much for him. So Cornelius Fudge got the top job, and Crouch was shunted sideways into the Department of International Magical Cooperation.”

There was a long silence. Harry was thinking of the way Crouch’s eyes had bulged as he’d looked down at his disobedient house-elf back in the wood at the Quidditch World Cup. This, then, must have been why Crouch had overreacted to Winky being found beneath the Dark Mark. It had brought back memories of his son, and the old scandal, and his fall from grace at the Ministry.

“Moody says Crouch is obsessed with catching Dark wizards,” Harry told Sirius.

“He’s one to talk!” Draco said in a shrill voice, and shuddered.

“Yeah, I’ve heard it’s become a bit of a mania with Crouch,” said Sirius, nodding. “If you ask me, he still thinks he can bring back the old popularity by catching one more Death Eater. And I think we all know there are more than a few lurking around out there, eh?” he said, with a grim smile.

“Like the ones at the Quidditch World Cup?” asked Harry.

Sirius had a very strange, tight look on his face. “Yeah,” he said, “and they might not be the only ones.” He cleared his throat, caught Harry’s eye, and then looked down at the other half of the bread, but he didn’t start eating again. Instead he said, quietly, “Listen, Harry, I know he’s your—your Head of House, but I’m concerned about Snape. Ever since I found out he was teaching here, I’ve wondered why Dumbledore hired him. Snape’s always been fascinated by the Dark Arts, he was famous for it at school. Slimy, oily, greasy-haired kid, he was,” Sirius added, and Ron grinned, but Harry and Draco frowned at him, and Sirius continued quickly: “Anyway, the point is, Snape knew more curses when he arrived at school than half the kids in seventh year, and he was part of a gang of Slytherins who nearly all turned out to be Death Eaters.”

Sirius held up his fingers and began ticking off names.

“Rosier and Wilkes—they were both killed by Aurors the year before Voldemort fell. The Lestranges, whom we’ve mentioned already. Avery—from what I’ve heard he wormed his way out of trouble by saying he’d been acting under the Imperius Curse—like Draco’s parents—and he’s still at large.”

“You mean, what really _did_ happen to my parents, he used that as an excuse,” Draco hurried to clarify.

Sirius raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t that what I said?” he said drily. “Anyway, as far as I know, Snape was never even accused of being a Death Eater—not that that means much. Plenty of them were never caught. And Snape’s certainly clever and cunning enough to keep himself out of trouble.”

“Didn’t you say Karkaroff was a Death Eater?” Draco said, glaring at Sirius. “I don’t know why you’re making a fuss over Snape, who wasn’t even accused, when we _know_ there’s a former Death Eater at Hogwarts already.”

“Yeah, you should’ve seen Snape’s face when Karkaroff turned up in Potions yesterday!” said Harry quickly. “Karkaroff wanted to talk to Snape, he says Snape’s been avoiding him. Karkaroff looked really worried. He showed Snape something on his arm, but I couldn’t see what it was.”

“He showed Snape something on his arm?” said Sirius, looking frankly bewildered. He ran his fingers distractedly through his filthy hair, then shrugged again. “Well, I’ve no idea what that’s about—”

“Oh,” said Goyle, looking up brightly, “I bet it’s his—”

“Shut-up!” Draco snapped. “Can’t you tell when the _clever_ people are talking? When we want you to hit something or carry something, we’ll call for you!”

Goyle wilted, and even Harry, who was used to Draco’s callous treatment of their friends, stared at him; he had never heard Draco take that tone with Goyle before, not even when he accidentally squirted him with a gobstone or spilled something sticky on one of Draco’s homework essays. The others were looking at Draco as if he had just grown a second head, except for Crabbe, who had bent down and wrapped both hands around the stalagmite, and was trying to pull it out of the ground like it was a weed. His thick fingers slipped on the smooth stone and he tipped over backwards, landing on his rear, but nobody felt like laughing just then, not even Goyle.

Draco’s pale cheeks were flushed and he looked embarrassed, but he didn’t try and apologize.

“Well…” said Harry slowly, trying to change the subject, “I can’t see that Dumbledore would have hired Professor Snape if he didn’t trust him, Sirius, and if he had been a Death Eater” —Harry almost snorted at the idea of one of their teachers working for Voldemort, but he restrained the urge— “don’t you think he’d be nicer to Karkaroff?”

“Why was Crouch so keen to get into Snape’s office then?” said Ron stubbornly. “And Hermione tells me Moody searched it too, didn’t he?”

Harry shot Hermione an angry look, but she was still gaping at Draco, and didn’t see.

“Well,” said Sirius slowly, “I wouldn’t put it past Mad-Eye to have searched every single teacher’s office when he got to Hogwarts. He takes his Defense Against the Dark Arts seriously, Moody. I’m not sure _he_ trusts anyone at all, and after the things he’s seen, it’s not surprising. I’ll say this for Moody, though, he never killed if he could help it. Always brought people in alive where possible.”

“HA!” said Draco sharply, still very pink-cheeked. “That’s probably just because he wanted to enjoy torturing them later!”

Sirius shook his head. “I can understand why you’d dislike him,” he said, “but Moody wasn’t the sort to be entertained by a needless excess of force…not that he went easy on people, mind, as you lot have seen for yourselves. He was tough, but he never descended to the level of the Death Eaters. Crouch, though…he’s a different matter…is he really ill? If he is, why did he make the effort to drag himself up to Snape’s office? And if he’s not…what’s he up to? What was he doing at the World Cup that was important he didn’t turn up in the Top Box? What’s he been doing while he should have been judging the tournament?”

Sirius lapsed into silence, still staring at the cave wall.

“I’ll write my parents and get you a wand,” Draco burst out suddenly. Everybody turned to stare at him and his face paled under the scrutiny. “It’s just—it’s just not right,” he muttered defensively, “a wizard without a wand…you might as well be a, a _Muggle_ …or,” he added, raising his chin and shooting a cold look in Hermione’s direction, “a house-elf.”

She scowled at him.

Sirius was eyeing Draco as if unsure what to make of his offer.

“But—how can they get Sirius a wand?” Harry asked, hoping he wasn’t saying something stupid. “I mean, don’t people have to get their _own_ wands?” He remembered Mr. Ollivander, when Harry had gone to Diagon Alley for the first time, telling him that _the wand chooses the wizard_. It had seemed like a pretty important detail, at least in Ollivander’s mind.

“It’s better if one does, of course,” Hermione explained, before anyone else could; even when she wasn’t in class, she had a habit of making sure she answered questions first. “But you _can_ use any wand; it’s just that certain ones will work better for you than others, and your own best of all.”

“I’ve got my brother Charlie’s old wand,” Ron muttered, scuffing his foot on the stones. “It works fine.”

Harry looked at Ron curiously. “If you’ve got Charlie’s wand, what’s he using—?” he started to ask, but Draco wasn’t listening.

“I expect _his_ wand was broken when he was sent to Azkaban,” he said, pointing at Sirius. “That’s the usual procedure, I believe, when there’s no one to claim the convicted’s effects….”

“Been studying up on Azkaban procedure, have you?” Ron said in a nasty voice.

Draco raised his chin haughtily. “Anyway,” he continued, as if he hadn’t heard, “I wasn’t going to have them go buy him one, just send one of the old spares we’ve got floating around the house.”

“You’ve got spare wands?” Harry said. “What for?”

“Well, like when people die for instance?” Draco said, giving him the kind of withering look he usually reserved for Crabbe and Goyle at their stupidest. “Sometimes people are buried with their wands, sometimes they aren’t; sometimes the family keeps them.” He shrugged. “I’ll have them send one.”

“And you think your parents will be happy to lend me an old wand, do you?” Sirius asked, in a voice that suggested that he, at least, was less than thrilled at the idea.

Draco rolled his eyes. “I’m not going to tell them it’s for _you_ ,” he scoffed. “What do you take me for?” He shook his head and jerked his thumb over his shoulder, pointing at Crabbe and Goyle, and continued: “I’ll say one of them broke their wand and they don’t want to admit it to their parents. Mother and father will believe that; those two oafs are always breaking things. I think I’ll say it was Goyle,” Draco mused, eyeing them both speculatively. They looked slightly offended but they didn’t argue; they never did, when Draco spoke. “Mother knows Mrs. Crabbe too well, she might be tempted to mention it, and then we’d be in a pickle trying to explain things.”

He looked at Sirius and said coolly, “Unless you think your werewolf friend can get one for you?”

Sirius glowered. “Never you mind about Moony,” he growled. “He’s got enough to be going on with, without risking getting himself in trouble helping me.”

“I note you have no problem letting _us_ risk ourselves,” Draco said sharply.

Sirius smirked. “You’re kids,” he said. “You can get away with it…especially you,” he added, with a pointed look at Draco, who sniffed but didn’t argue; he knew as well as any of them that Sirius was telling the truth, although Harry was a little surprised that Sirius already seemed to know Draco so well.

Suddenly Sirius looked up at Ron.

“You say your brother’s Crouch’s personal assistant? Any chance you could ask him if he’s seen Crouch lately?”

“I can try,” said Ron eagerly. Harry suspected that there wasn’t much Sirius could ask that Ron wouldn’t be keen to do, in hopes of making up for having once been the owner of the rat that had turned out to be Peter Pettigrew. “Better not make it sound like I reckon Crouch is up to anything dodgy, though. Percy loves Crouch.”

“And you might try and find out whether they’ve got any leads on Bertha Jorkins while you’re at it,” said Sirius, gesturing to the second copy of the _Daily Prophet_.

“Yeah,” said Ron, “yeah, absolutely, I’ll ask him.”

“Bagman told me they hadn’t,” said Harry.

“Yes, he’s quoted in the article in there,” said Sirius, nodding at the paper. “Blustering on about how bad Bertha’s memory is. Well, maybe she’s changed since I knew her, but the Bertha I knew wasn’t forgetful at all—quite the reverse. She was a bit dim, but she had an excellent memory for gossip. It used to get her into a lot of trouble; she never knew when to keep her mouth shut. I can see her being a bit of a liability at the Ministry of Magic…maybe that’s why Bagman didn’t bother to look for her for so long….”

Sirius heaved an enormous sigh and rubbed his shadowed eyes.

“What’s the time?”

Harry checked his watch, then remembered it hadn’t been working since it had spent over an hour in the lake.

“It’s half past three,” said Hermione.

“You’d better get back to school,” Sirius said, getting to his feet. “Now listen…” He looked particularly hard at Harry. “I don’t want you lot sneaking out of school to see me, all right? Just send notes to me here. I still want to hear about anything odd. But you’re not to go leaving Hogwarts without permission; it would be an ideal opportunity for someone to attack you.”

“No one’s tried to attack me so far, except a dragon and a couple of grindylows,” Harry said, but Sirius scowled at him.

“I don’t care…I’ll breathe freely again when this tournament’s over, and that’s not until June. And don’t forget, if you’re talking about me among yourselves, call me Snuffles, okay?”

“Snuffles?” said Draco, and sniggered.

“I thought his name was Sirius,” said Goyle, frowning worriedly.

Draco rolled his eyes.

“Don’t be stupid,” said Crabbe, thumping Goyle heavily on the shoulder. “He means as a name day plum.”

Hermione looked horrified at Crabbe’s mispronunciation, but Harry and Draco were too used to their friends mangling words to bother correcting him, and Hermione didn’t dare.

Sirius exchanged the empty napkin and flask for the food that Crabbe and Goyle had carried out in their bags. Harry was surprised to see nearly all of it was still there; he supposed that they had been too distracted first by their butterbeers and then by the stalagmite to have much of a chance for snacking. Sirius thanked them both for carrying it out to him, but he looked confused when Goyle tried to explain the difference between food and food-that-had-been-animals.

“Don’t worry about it,” Harry said quickly, shaking his head when Sirius looked like he was about to ask a question.

“I’ll walk to the edge of the village with you,” said Sirius, “see if I can scrounge another paper.”

“Is that—is that a good idea?” Hermione said nervously. “Someone might recognize you….”

“No one’s realized so far,” said Sirius blithely. He transformed into the great black dog before they left the cave, and they walked back down the mountainside with him, across the boulder-strewn ground, and back to the stile. Here he allowed each of them to pat him on the head (“Good doggie!” said Goyle, sounding delighted), before turning and setting off at a run around the outskirts of the village. Harry and the others made their way back into Hogsmeade and up toward Hogwarts.

“Wonder if Percy knows all that stuff about Crouch?” Ron said as they walked up the drive to the castle. “But maybe he doesn’t care…it’d probably just make him admire Crouch even more. Yeah, Percy loves rules. He’d just say Crouch was refusing to break them for his own son.”

“Percy would never throw any of his family to the dementors,” said Hermione savagely.

“I don’t know,” said Ron. “If he thought we were standing in the way of his career…Percy’s really ambitious, you know….”

They walked up the stone steps and into the entrance hall, where the delicious smells of dinner wafted toward them from the Great Hall.

“Poor old Snuffles,” said Ron, breathing deeply. “Your god-father must really love you, Potter….Imagine having to live off rats.”

“Hang on,” said Goyle, frowning, “ain’t rats animals, too?”

The others groaned and walked in to dinner without answering him.


	25. The Madness of Mister Crouch

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This section contains several sporadic excerpts from Chapter Twenty-Eight, stretching from page 535 to page 563 of the American hardcover edition. It also includes a few descriptive excerpts from Chapter Twenty-One, since this is Harry’s first visit to the kitchens in this continuity, and it seemed appropriate to lift the same visuals he would have seen had he gone there then.

Harry went up to the Owlery after breakfast on Sunday with Ron and Hermione, because neither of them had an owl of their own, and Harry had been quick to offer Hedwig for carrying the letter to Ron’s brother. He thought it might cheer her up because it had been so long since she’d had a job. When they had watched her fly out of sight through the Owlery window, Harry turned around to head back to the dungeons, but Hermione stopped him.

“Actually, Harry…would you like to go see Winky?” she asked tentatively.

Harry opened his mouth, intending to say that he didn’t think there was anything new that Winky could tell him, but when he saw Ron nodding and waggling his eyebrows enthusiastically behind Hermione's back, he changed his mind. “Yeah, all right,” he said.

Hermione’s face split in a wide smile and she led the way toward the cellars. Ron and Harry fell into step together behind her. Ron leaned over and whispered, “You won’t be disappointed.” He was grinning almost as broadly as Hermione, and rubbing his stomach in anticipation.

They turned away from Harry’s usual staircase beneath the entrance hall and walked down a broad stone corridor, brightly lit with torches, and decorated with cheerful paintings that were mainly of food. Hermione led them to a painting with a gigantic silver fruit bowl, stretched out her forefinger, and tickled the huge green pear. It began to squirm, chuckling, and suddenly turned into a large green door handle. Hermione seized it, pulled the door open, and led the way inside.

Ron gave Harry another exaggerated, encouraging nod, and Harry climbed through after her. He looked around at the enormous, high-ceilinged room, large as the Great Hall above it, with mounds of glittering brass pots and pans heaped around the stone walls, and a great brick fireplace at the other end. Between Harry and the fireplace stood four long wooden tables, each of which, Harry noticed as Hermione led him past them, was positioned exactly beneath the four House tables above, in the Great Hall. At the moment, they were clear of food, breakfast having finished, but he supposed that an hour ago they had been laden with dishes that were then sent up through the ceiling to their counterparts above.

At least a hundred little elves were standing around the kitchen, beaming, bowing, and curtseying to Harry, Ron, and Hermione. They were all wearing the same uniform: a tea towel stamped with the Hogwarts crest, and tied, as Winky’s had been, like a toga. A few of them had paused what they were doing to begin making tea, but they turned around and bowed when the students passed them.

“No chance of more of those éclairs, is there?” said Ron, who was looking around at the beaming and bowing house-elves.

“You’ve just had breakfast!” said Hermione irritably, but a great silver platter of éclairs was already zooming toward them, supported by four elves.

“See?” Ron said thickly to Harry, half an éclair already in his mouth. “Told you it was worth it. Go on—try one!”

Harry obediently took an éclair, even though he wasn’t hungry; breakfast hadn’t been that long ago. It was a good pastry, though, and he licked the cream off his fingers, thinking how Crabbe and Goyle would react if they ever saw this place.

“Wonder if they’d give me some stuff to send to Snuffles,” Harry muttered, eyeing the cheerful looking elves.

“I bet they’d give you the tea towels off their backs if you asked,” Ron replied, starting on his second éclair. “About the only thing they don’t seem to like doing is listening to Hermione when she tries to tell them how much happier freedom would make them. Oi!” he asked, turning to the nearest elf, “You couldn’t give us a bit of extra food, could you?” At once several of the surrounding elves bowed delightedly and hurried off to get some more.

Hermione, meanwhile, had been talking to another group of elves, who looked much less happy than the ones pressing tea and pastries on Harry and Ron. They pointed grimly toward the fireplace. “Oh dear,” said Hermione, and Harry looked over to see what she was looking at.

Winky was indeed there, sitting on a stool, but she was so filthy that she was not immediately distinguishable from the smoke-blackened brick behind her. Unlike the other elves, she was wearing clothes—a little skirt and blouse and a matching hat, which had holes in it for her large ears. However, while every one of the togas the other elves were wearing were so clean and well cared for that they looked brand-new, Winky was plainly not taking care of her clothes at all. They were ragged and unwashed and there were soup stains all down her blouse and a burn in her skirt. She was clutching a bottle of butterbeer and swaying slightly on her stool, staring into the fire. As they watched her, she gave an enormous hiccup.

“We is not sure why you is so interested in a disgraced elf, sir,” said a house-elf with a scruffy tuft of hair in the very center of its forehead. “This one is not a good example of a house-elf, sir. She is getting through six bottles a day now, sir.”

“Well, it’s not strong, that stuff,” Harry said.

But the elf shook its head. “’Tis strong for a house-elf, sir,” it said.

Winky hiccupped again. The elves who had brought the éclairs gave her disapproving looks as they returned to work. Most of the other elves trotted off as well, as though they could not stand to be in the same part of the kitchen as poor Winky.

Harry looked at Hermione, who was staring down at the miserable elf with a worried, perplexed expression on her face. “She isn’t adjusting well at all,” she confided quietly to Harry. “I really thought she’d have turned things around by now, but I suppose she’s still—still pining for her old life…well, it’s the only one she’s ever known, so I guess any change—even a change for the better—is going to be shocking….”

Harry, who had thought that Winky looked miserable in the Top Box, and miserable in the forest, thought that she had never looked as miserable as this. He wondered if Winky would agree with Hermione that being freed had been a change for the better.

“Maybe…maybe if you talk to her about Mr. Crouch?” Hermione suggested hopefully.

Harry didn’t see what good reminding Winky of what she had lost would do, but he obediently bent down next to the swaying elf and said, “Er—hey Winky…” The elf didn’t seem to hear him; her eyes were glassy, and her long fingers were wrapped very tightly around her bottle of butterbeer. “We were wondering if you could tell us anything about, um, about your old master…” Winky continued swaying, staring dully across the kitchen away from Harry. He was struck by a sudden inspiration, and he said, “Did you hear Mr. Crouch was sneaking around Professor Snape’s office a few nights ago? You wouldn't know what he might be looking for, would you?”

That penetrated the elf’s stupor. She looked up at Harry, her big eyes shining. “Master is— _hic_ —is coming here?”

“Yeah,” said Harry, “he was here for the first task of the tournament, too, but he stopped coming after that…you don’t know what he might be up to, do you?”

Winky’s eyes flickered. “M—master is stopped— _hic_ —coming?”

“Yeah,” said Harry, “except to sneak around at night, I guess. The _Daily Prophet_ ’s saying he’s ill.”

Winky swayed some more, staring blurrily at Harry.

“Master— _hic_ —ill?”

Her bottom lip began to tremble.

“But we’re not sure if that’s true,” said Hermione quickly.

“Master is needing his— _hic_ —Winky!” whimpered the elf. “Master cannot— _hic_ —manage— _hic_ —all by himself….”

“Other people manage to do their own housework, you know, Winky,” Hermione said severely.

Harry, imagining what Draco would say at the mere suggestion, had to smother a laugh in his sleeve.

“Winky— _hic_ —is not only— _hic_ —doing housework for Mr. Crouch!” Winky squeaked indignantly, swaying worse than ever and slopping butterbeer down her already heavily stained blouse. “Mast is— _hic_ —trusting Winky with— _hic_ —the most important— _hic_ —the most secret—”

“What?” said Harry.

But Winky shook her head very hard, spilling more butterbeer down herself.

“Winky keeps— _hic_ —her master’s secrets,” she said mutinously, swaying very heavily now, frowning up at Harry with her eyes crossed. “You is— _hic_ —nosing, you is.”

“No, no,” Harry said hurriedly, “I’m just—I’m just worried about him, is all, Winky. I’m one of the champions in the tournament, right? And I’m afraid that…that all of Mr. Crouch’s hard work setting it up will go to waste, if he doesn’t get some help…come on, Winky, tell me what he’s up to, so I can help. I want to help.”

“Master—master is— _hic_ —is doing…doing very important— _hic_ —important things— _hic_ —private and secret— _hic_ —family things— _hic_ —and Winky— _hic_ —Winky is a good house-elf— _hic_ —Winky keeps her— _hic_ —silence….”

Winky’s eyelids drooped and suddenly, without warning, she slid off her stool into the hearth, snoring loudly. The empty bottle of butterbeer rolled away across the stone-flagged floor. Half a dozen house-elves came hurrying forward, looking disgusted. One of them picked up the bottle; the others covered Winky with a large checked tablecloth and tucked the ends in neatly, hiding her from view.

“We is sorry you had to see that, sirs and miss!” squeaked a nearby elf, shaking his head and looking very ashamed. It wasn’t the same one that had spoken to Harry before, although Harry could only tell them apart by their hair. “We is hoping you will not judge us all by Winky, sirs and miss!”

“She’s unhappy!” said Hermione, exasperated. “Why don’t you try and cheer her up instead of covering her up?”

“Begging your pardon, miss,” said the house-elf, bowing deeply again, “but house-elves has no right to be unhappy when there is work to be done and masters to be served.”

“Oh for heaven’s sake!” Hermione cried. “Listen to me, all of you! You’ve got just as much right to wages and holidays and proper clothes, you don’t have to do everything you’re told—you can all be free too, and there’s no reason why you should feel guilty about it! Maybe if you talked to Winky a little more, you could help her feel better about her future, and you might all see how much nicer it is to be free!”

“Er, Hermione,” Harry muttered, “I’m not sure that Winky’s the best example to be using….”

The cheery smiles had vanished from the faces of the house-elves around the kitchen. They were suddenly looking at Hermione as though she were mad and dangerous.

“We has your extra food!” squeaked an elf at Harry’s elbow, and he shoved a large ham, a dozen cakes, and some fruit into Harry’s arms. “Good-bye!”

The house-elves crowded around Harry, Ron, and Hermione and began shunting them out of the kitchen, many little hands pushing in the smalls of their backs.

“We hopes you is enjoying the food,” said the elf with the scruffy tuft hurriedly, pulling Harry along by his sleeve. “Er—yeah,” said Harry, “thanks…” but the elf wasn’t listening.

“You couldn’t keep your mouth shut, could you, Hermione?” said Ron angrily as they kitchen door slammed shut behind them. “They won’t want us visiting them now! We could’ve tried to get more stuff out of Winky about Crouch!”

“Oh as if you care about that!” scoffed Hermione. “You only like coming down here for the food!”

Harry was very glad to leave them sniping at each other and return to the dungeon.

He waited until after dinner to send the food to Sirius, thinking that it would be better to mail such a large package when there weren’t so many people outside who might look up and wonder where it was going.

He enlisted three of the school screech owls to carry the ham and cakes and fruit. When they had set off into the dusk, looking extremely odd carrying the large package between them, Harry leaned on the windowsill, looking out at the grounds, at the dark, rustling treetops of the Forbidden Forest, and the rippling sails of the Durmstrang ship. An eagle owl even larger than Draco’s flew through the coil of smoke rising from Hagrid’s chimney; it soared toward the castle, around the Owlery, and out of sight. Looking down, Harry saw Hagrid digging energetically in front of his cabin. Harry wondered what he was doing; it looked as though he were making a new vegetable patch. As he watched, Madame Maxime emerged from the Beauxbatons carriage and walked over to Hagrid. She appeared to be trying to engage him in conversation. Hagrid leaned upon his spade, but did not seem keen to prolong their talk, because Madame Maxime returned to the carriage shortly afterward.

Unwilling to go back to the Slytherin dungeon and return to his homework, Harry watched Hagrid digging until the darkness swallowed him and the owls around Harry began to awake, swooshing past him into the night.

 

By breakfast the next day Harry was regretting his idle night, and was busy scribbling a few closing sentences on his essay for Divination when Draco said, “Loads of owls at the Gryffindor table this morning, aren’t there? I think most of them are for Granger—but who could be writing to her? It’s not like she knows a lot of wizards….”

Harry turned around. Across the Great Hall, a multitude of various-colored owls were descending on the Gryffindor table and, as Draco had pointed out, most of them seemed to be crowding around Hermione so that soon Harry could barely see the top of her bushy head above the cluster of feathers. Curious, Harry turned around on his bench to see better. He wondered if all that mail had anything to do with Sirius—but no, Sirius wouldn’t be writing to Hermione, and he certainly wouldn’t have had to send so many owls just to deliver a letter.

“Maybe the booksellers in Diagon Alley are having a sale,” Harry suggested, but just then Hermione jumped to her feet and ran out of the Hall, leaving the irritated owls behind.

Harry shrugged and turned back to his essay. He thought he might have mixed up the proclivities of Mars and Venus, but he figured that as long as he ended the piece with a horrible prediction of his own death, Professor Trelawney would give him full marks anyway.

After Divination was Care of Magical Creatures, which at least was outside in the fresh air, far away from the cloying perfume of Professor Trelawney’s tower.

Hagrid, who had told them last lesson that they had finished with unicorns, was waiting for them outside his cabin with a fresh supply of open crates at his feet. Harry’s heart sank at the sight of the crates—surely not another skrewt hatching?—but when he got near enough to see inside, he found himself looking at a number of fluffy black creatures with long snouts. Their front paws were curiously flat, like spades, and they were blinking up at the class, looking politely puzzled at all the attention.

Harry recognized them at once, and smirked at the memory. He glanced sideways and saw that Draco was already hurriedly pulling off his rings and stuffing them into his pockets.

“These’re nifflers,” Hagrid told the rest of the class, once they had gathered around. “Yeh find ‘em down mines mostly. They like sparkly stuff…. There yeh go, look.”

One of the nifflers had suddenly leapt up and attempted to bite Pansy Parkinson’s watch off her wrist. She shrieked and jumped backward.

“Useful little treasure detectors,” said Hagrid happily. “Thought we’d have some fun with ‘em today. See over there?” He pointed at the large patch of freshly turned earth Harry had watched him digging from the Owlery window. “I’ve buried some gold coins. I’ve got a prize fer whoever picks the niffler that digs up most. Jus’ take off all yer valuables, an’ choose a niffler, an’ get ready ter set ‘em loose.”

Harry took off his watch, which he was only wearing out of habit, as it didn’t work anymore, and stuffed it into his pocket. Then he picked up a niffler. It put its long snout in Harry’s ear and sniffed enthusiastically. It was much more cuddly than the last niffler Harry had dealt with—possibly because it wasn’t trying to chew its way through his fingers.

“Hang on,” said Hagrid, looking down into the crate, “there’s a spare niffler here…who’s missin’? Where’s Hermione?”

Harry looked around; he hadn’t realized that she had not walked down from the school with the rest of the Gryffindors. He opened his mouth to ask what could possibly have inspired Hermione Granger to skip a class, but before he could speak, Ron said, “She had to go to the hospital wing.” He shot Harry a strange look, but didn’t explain further, possibly because Pansy was craning her neck in a very obvious attempt to eavesdrop.

“Well, she’s gonna miss a great lesson,” Hagrid said, looking pleased with himself as he ushered the class toward the loose dirt. “Go on, then,” he told them, grinning, “let’s see what yer nifflers can do!”

It was easily the most fun they had ever had in Care of Magical Creatures. The nifflers dived in and out of the patch of earth as though it were water, each scurrying back to the student who had released it and spitting gold into their hands. Even Pansy looked like she was enjoying herself, although she grimaced at the dirt that clung to the coins her niffler spat-up. Ron’s was particularly efficient; it had soon filled his lap with coins.

“Can you buy these as pets, Hagrid?” he asked excitedly as the niffler dived back into the soil, splattering his robes.

“Yer mum wouldn’ be happy, Ron,” said Hagrid, grinning. “They wreck houses, nifflers. I reckon they’ve nearly got the lot, now,” he added, pacing around the patch of earth while the nifflers continued to dive. “I on’y buried a hundred coins. Oh there y’are, Hermione!”

Hermione was walking toward them across the lawn. Her hands were very heavily bandaged and she looked miserable. Harry wondered what had happened. He passed his niffler to Crabbe, who could easily hold one in each of his meaty hands, and started toward Hermione to ask her, but then—

“Well, let’s check how yeh’ve done!” said Hagrid. “Count yer coins! An’ there’s no point tryin’ ter steal any, Goyle,” he added, his beetle-black eyes narrowed. “It’s leprechaun gold. Vanishes after a few hours.”

Goyle emptied his pockets, looking extremely sulky while Draco, Crabbe, and Harry laughed at him. “You didn’t think that oaf would be able to afford to give away a hundred gold coins to every class, did you?” Draco sniggered. Goyle pouted.

Ron sighed heavily. “It shouldn’t be allowed, leprechaun gold,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s a right nasty trick, that’s what it is.”

Goyle, still pouting, nodded firmly.

It turned out that Ron’s niffler had been most successful, so Hagrid gave him an enormous slab of Honeydukes chocolate for a prize. Both Crabbe and Goyle stared at it hungrily. The bell rang across the grounds for lunch; the rest of the class set off back to the castle, but the Gryffindor boys stayed behind to help Hagrid put the nifflers back in their boxes. Hermione walked over to Hagrid to ask him what she had to do to make up for the missed lesson, and Harry followed her, wanting to know why she had been in hospital. Crabbe and Goyle complained about being late for lunch, but Harry ignored them; _he_ wasn’t the one stopping them from returning to the castle with the others.

“—thought maybe I could come down in the evening, if my hands are better, or maybe write you an essay over the week-end…?” Hermione was saying, sounding anxious.

“Ah, don’ worry abou’ it,” Hagrid said, waving her concerns away with one dinner plate-sized hand. “Yeh can read up on nifflers later—won’ be as much fun, o’ course, but it’ll get yeh the basic gist, it will. Now, what’ve yeh done ter your hands?” he asked, clearly more interested in why she had missed his lesson than he was in obtaining make-up work to compensate for it.

Hermione hung her head. “I got some—er—unpleasant letters at breakfast this morning,” she said quietly. “Apparently a few people are—er—a bit upset about what Rita Skeeter wrote about—about me and Harry and Viktor, and…well….”

“And one of the nasty tossers sent her an envelope full of undiluted bubotuber pus,” Ron chimed in, dumping his last niffler in its crate and dusting his hands off. Thomas and Finnigan started up to the castle, having doubtless heard all about Hermione’s troubles with the post at breakfast, but Ron walked over to stand next to Hermione, peering at her bandages curiously.

She nodded, now looking down at her feet. “Yes,” she said, in a very tiny voice, “that’s what happened.”

“Aaah, don’ worry,” said Hagrid gently, looking down at her. “I got some o’ those letters an’ all, after Rita Skeeter wrote abou’ me mum. _‘Yeh’re a monster an’ yeh should be put down.’ ‘Yer mother killed innocent people an’ if you had any decency you’d jump in a lake.’”_

“No!” said Hermione, looking shocked.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if they said worse than that,” Draco muttered. Harry tried to stomp on his foot but missed and stepped on Goyle’s instead. Luckily Goyle was too busy squinting at a piece of leprechaun gold to notice, and Draco had spoken too quietly for anyone but Harry to hear.

“Yeah,” said Hagrid, heaving the niffler crates over by his cabin wall. “They’re jus’ nutters, Hermione. Don’ open ‘em if yeh get any more. Chuck ‘em straigh’ in the fire.”

Hermione nodded, still looking wan, but she joined the others for the walk back to the castle.

“So how big were your fingers before Madam Pomfrey punctured them?” Draco asked.

“Hey!” said Ron, looking up angrily from his chocolate bar. “Watch yourself!”

Crabbe—already grumpy from having his lunch delayed—cracked his knuckles threateningly and said, “You watch it.”

Ron eyed the larger boy sidelong, but didn’t say anything else.

Harry fell into step beside Hermione. “I’m—listen, I’m really sorry,” he said, but she shook her head.

“Forget it,” Hermione said. “It isn’t your fault. It’s that—that stupid Skeeter woman. I _hate_ her!” she burst out savagely as they climbed the steps to the entrance hall. “I’ll get her back for this if it’s the last thing I do!”

Harry and Draco exchanged a nervous look; there was a gleam in her brown eyes that unsettled Harry. He didn’t think he had ever seen Hermione look that angry, or that determined. It was almost a relief to separate from her and Ron at the door of the Great Hall and retreat to the Slytherin table, on the far side of the room from where the Gryffindors sat.

Harry was halfway through a generous helping of shepherd’s pie, and enjoying every bite, when someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned around and was surprised to see Viktor Krum frowning down at him. While Krum and the other Durmstrang students had eaten with the Slytherins at nearly every meal since they had arrived at Hogwarts, Krum himself didn’t do much talking, and generally preferred to sit surrounded by his friends from Durmstrang rather than socializing with the Hogwarts students. Many of his other classmates were more sociable, but as far as Harry had noticed, Krum replied to most conversational forays with monosyllabic responses and had yet to initiate a single conversation—until now.

Harry swallowed his generous mouthful and put his fork down. “Er—yeah?” he said.

“Could I haff a word?” Krum asked. His eyes flickered between the students sitting on either side of Harry. “In private, please?”

“Um—sure,” said Harry. He pushed his plate away and started to stand, Draco rising with him, but Krum shook his head. “Just Potter, please,” he reiterated firmly.

Draco, looking hurt, dropped back into his seat. Harry caught sight of the forlorn expression on his pointed face and muttered, “Probably just something stupid about the tournament, maybe he wants to know where we got the gillyweed. Don’t worry, I’ll tell him that asking Snape was your idea….” He swung his leg over the bench and hurried after Krum, glancing back over his shoulder anxiously. He couldn’t tell if Draco looked mollified by his attempt to play-down Krum’s request. He hoped that whatever it was, it would be something he could deal with quickly. He wanted to get back to the others before Draco started sulking—and he wouldn’t mind a few more bites of lunch, either.

They walked out into the entrance hall, where Harry stopped, expecting that the deserted room would be private enough, but Krum kept going into the adjoining courtyard. “What’s up?” Harry asked, trotting to catch up.

“Don’t vont to be overheard,” said Krum shortly. The courtyard was empty, everyone else still being at lunch, but that wasn’t good enough for Krum. He paced once around the circumference of the courtyard, peering into bushes and behind walls, checking for eavesdroppers.

Harry, thinking of the bandages on Hermione’s hands and the nasty way Rita Skeeter had of printing private conversations, couldn’t blame him for being paranoid.

At last satisfied that there was no one hiding in the foliage, Krum turned to face Harry.

“I want to know,” he said, glowering, “vot there is between you and Herm-own-ninny.”

Harry, who from Krum’s secretive manner had expected something much more serious than this, stared up at Krum in amazement.

“Nothing,” he said. But Krum glowered at him, and Harry, somehow struck anew by how tall Krum was, elaborated. “We’re friends. She’s not my girlfriend and she never has been. It’s just that Skeeter woman making things up.”

“Herm-own-ninny talks about you very often,” said Krum, looking suspiciously at Harry.

“Yeah,” said Harry, “because we’re _friends.”_

He couldn’t quite believe he was having this conversation with Viktor Krum, the famous International Quidditch player. It was as though the eighteen-year-old Krum thought he, Harry, was an equal—a real rival—

“You haff never…you haff not…”

“No,” said Harry very firmly.

Krum looked slightly happier. He stared at Harry for a few seconds, then said, “You fly very vell. I vos votching at the first task.”

“Thanks,” said Harry, grinning broadly and suddenly feeling much taller himself. “I saw you at the Quidditch World Cup. The Wronksi Feint, you really made it all look like—like art, or ballet, or something.” Harry could feel his face starting to heat up, but to his surprise, instead of grunting and stomping away, Krum actually smiled. It wasn’t a _large_ smile—but Harry hadn’t seen the Durmstrang champion look that happy since the Yule Ball.

Deciding to take a chance before he could come to his senses and talk himself out of it, Harry said quickly, “You know, if you ever want to fly—just for fun, like, to keep sharp—we could use the Quidditch pitch some evening. It’s free for student use as long as none of the teams are practicing, and since they canceled Quidditch this year, well….” Harry shrugged.

Krum’s dark eyes brightened. “I vould like that, I think,” he said. “It has been a long time since I haff gone this long without flying.”

Harry nodded. “Me too,” he said. “Er—I’m on one of the school teams here, I mean, so I could probably get a bunch of people together sometime if you wanted to scrimmage or something, or if you’d rather do—do Seeker drills, my friend Draco flies Seeker too, so there would be three of us, and—” Harry swallowed and forced himself to say, “Cedric’s a Seeker too, we could ask him, and Cho Chang—the girl who went to the Yule Ball with Cedric? She flies Seeker for the Ravenclaw team….”

Krum nodded, looking almost as animated as he had when he had been telling Hermione about the Durmstrange Institute. “That sounds good,” he said. “The Seeker drills, I like that idea. You haff much cleverness, Harry Potter.”

“Great,” said Harry, grinning so that he thought his face might split in half, “how about Friday?”

 

Hate mail continued to arrive for Hermione over the following week, and although she followed Hagrid’s advice and stopped opening it, several of her ill-wishers sent Howlers, which exploded at the Gryffindor table and shrieked insults at her for the whole Hall to hear. Even those people who didn’t read _Witch Weekly_ knew all about the supposed Harry-Krum-Hermione triangle now. Harry was getting sick of telling people that Hermione wasn’t his girlfriend.

“It’ll die down, though,” he told Hermione, “if we just ignore it…. People got bored with that stuff she wrote about me last time—”

“I want to know how she’s listening into private conversations when she’s supposed to be banned from the grounds!” said Hermione angrily. “She’s heard all sorts of things she shouldn’t have been able to.”

“Maybe she has you bugged,” said Harry.

Hermione gave him a very cold look. “Haven’t you ever read _Hogwarts: A History?”_ she asked.

“Er…” said Harry.

“All those substitutes for magic Muggles use—electricity, computers, and radar, and all those things—they all go haywire around Hogwarts, there’s too much magic in the air. No, Rita’s using magic to eavesdrop, she must be…. If I could just find out what it is…ooh, if it’s illegal, I’ll have her…”

“Maybe she has an Invisibility Cloak,” Harry suggested, thinking of how many times he had overheard things he shouldn’t have when he was wearing his. “Ask Moody if you’re worried—he can see right through them with that freaky eye of his,” he explained, in answer to her puzzled look.

“Maybe she asked the beetles,” came a dreamy voice from across the hallway.

Harry and Hermione turned to see a group of third year Ravenclaws trooping past. One of them—Luna Lovegood, the bulging-eyed friend of Ginny Weasley whom Harry had taken to the Yule Ball—had stopped to stare at them. She looked as dotty as ever despite being dressed in her uniform: she had her wand stuck behind her left ear for safekeeping and a handful of butterbeer corks dangling around her neck, and she had pinned a big sprig of something that looked suspiciously like mistletoe in the band of her hat.

“Er…” said Harry, exchanging a skeptical look with Hermione.

“They really _listen_ , the beetles here,” Luna said earnestly. “More than most bugs do, I mean. I noticed it at the Yule Ball, Harry, you remember that beetle that was so interested in what Professor Hagrid and Madam Maxime were saying?”

“Right,” said Harry, “sure, I remember.” He rolled his eyes at Hermione, who looked like she couldn’t decide between being horrified or insulted.

“Yes,” Luna said dreamily, “it’s quite fascinating. I’ve asked several of them what it is that makes them so much more interested in human conversation than other bugs, but none of them have answered yet. Of course, I don’t think it’s _all_ bugs; mostly it just seems to be beetles, but I did see a butterfly yesterday that seemed particularly keen on what Gertrude was saying in Herbology…but that might have been because she had dumped pollen all over herself….”

One of Luna’s housemates leaned back to snag her by the sleeve and pull her along. She followed obediently, giving Harry and Hermione a friendly little wave before she allowed herself to be dragged away.

Hermione managed to wait until the Ravenclaws had disappeared around the corner before she burst out laughing. “Oh Harry—I’m sorry—but that girl is just so _strange!_ What were you thinking, going to the Yule Ball with her?”

Harry squirmed uncomfortably. “Well, everybody else was already going with someone,” he said, feeling defensive. “Ginny’s the one who set me up with her, she said they were friends….”

“They are,” Hermione confirmed, “I’ve noticed them together a few times, but—well…I wonder if maybe Ginny was having you on a bit.” Her eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “Or maybe…no, never mind. Anyway—what was it you were saying before, about Invisibility Cloaks?”

“Oh,” said Harry, wrenching his thoughts away from Ginny Weasleys’ weird friend, “just that if you’re worried that that’s how Rita Skeeter is sneaking onto the grounds, you should ask Moody about it. He’d know if anybody was wearing one, because he can see through them with that magical eye of his.”

Hermione raised her eyebrows. “And how would you know that?” she said in a very flat voice.

Harry flushed. “I wasn’t sneaking around, if that’s what you’re implying,” he said, which wasn’t technically a lie; Moody had discovered Harry’s cloak during a perfectly legal visit to Hogsmeade months before he had caught him coming out of the prefects’ bathroom with the egg. “I just wanted to avoid all the attention, you know? It was right after the announcement of the champions….”

“Ah,” said Hermione, understanding instantly. Her lips pursed in a grim smile. “I can understand the appeal of disappearing from sight, some days,” she muttered, and sighed. Then she squared her shoulders. “But you say Moody can see through those cloaks? Good. I’ll just go ask him if he’s noticed anyone other than you sneaking around in one, I don’t have Defense again until Thursday….”

“I haven’t been sneaking around,” Harry lied. “Anyway,” he shouted to Hermione’s retreating back, “you didn’t seem to object last year!”

It wasn’t until Hermione was out of sight and a group of giggling fifth year Hufflepuff girls had walked past him that Harry realized how that comment probably sounded to everyone who had read the _Witch Weekly_ article. He sighed and walked downstairs to join the rest of his class for Herbology.

 

The first people to walk out to join Harry and Draco for the Seeker Drills that he and Krum had discussed were Cho and Cedric, which got things off to an awkward start—at least for Harry.

They walked down the lawns together side-by-side, their broomsticks slung over their shoulders, laughing companionably. Harry felt a flash of jealousy grip him, colder than the sharp spring breeze, although his cheeks warmed in counterpoint when Cho turned toward him with a smile. “This was a really nice idea, Harry,” she told him. “I’m so glad you thought of it! I’ve really missed flying this year—er, not that I’m upset about watching the tournament instead, of course,” she hurried to explain, blushing furiously and shooting apologetic glances toward both Harry and Cedric, who grinned at her.

“I know what you mean,” he said. “I wish I’d been as clever as Harry here, and found a way to work my broomstick into the tasks!” He chuckled and winked at Harry, who was suddenly reminded of why the handsome Hufflepuff was so easy to hate.

Fortunately Draco spoke then, breaking what could have become an uncomfortable silence: “Oooh, here comes Krum!” he said, pointing toward the lake.

Trudging up toward them from the Durmstrang ship was Viktor Krum, his broomstick held loosely in one hand. Even from this distance that round-shouldered figure with the duck-footed walk was unmistakable. The four Hogwarts students waited eagerly for Krum to join him, all of them grinning unabashedly at the International Quidditch star. During the tournament, Harry and Cedric could consider themselves on an equal footing with the Durmstrang champion, but here on the Quidditch pitch they were in Krum’s element, and they all knew it.

He seemed a little uncertain when he reached them, however. “Good evening,” Krum said stiffly. “Er—so?”

It was Cedric who diffused the awkward moment. He leaned forward to shake Krum’s hand and said, “It’s real swell of you to agree to fly with us.”

Krum shrugged. “Vell,” he said, “Potter had a good point, it has been too long since I vas on a broom.”

“Same here,” said Cedric, grinning. “I was just saying to Harry here that I wish I’d thought to find a way to work some flying into one of the tasks, the way he did!”

Krum nodded. “Yes,” he said, “it vas a good idea. More fun-looking than vot I did, I think.”

Cedric laughed. “Me too!”

Harry could feel his face growing hot, especially when Cho nodded her agreement.

“It was mostly Draco’s idea,” Harry said quickly.

Draco preened as the others turned to look at him.

“Nice to have friends to help you think through these tasks,” Krum said. He sounded almost wistful.

Cedric nodded fervently. “I know I’m glad not to have to do all of it alone,” he said.

“But—surely everybody else from Durmstrang would want to help you win?” Cho asked, then blushed when Krum turned to look at her.

“Some are just sad it is not them competing,” he said.

“Oh,” said Cho softly.

Cedric looked concerned. “You’re not doing it all on your own, then?” he asked.

Krum shrugged. “Vell, Karkaroff is very interested in everything,” he said, sounding more surly than ever. “A little too interested, sometimes, I am thinking.”

Cedric smirked. “Yeah,” he said, “I’m pretty sure Dumbledore’s the one who’s bucking tradition there, by not sticking his fingers in everything.”

“Good thing not all the teachers are following his lead, huh?” Draco muttered slyly to Harry, who elbowed him in the side.

“But surely it can’t just be him,” Cho said worriedly. “I mean, your friends at least would want to help—?”

Krum’s dark eyes flashed. “Sometime it can be hard to know who is being a friend really, and who is just liking to stand next to you when the spotlights are on,” he said darkly.

“You’d think that would still be enough incentive to inspire them to help,” Draco protested.

“Yes,” said Krum, “but whose help to trust, and who is just wanting to see you made a fool of?”

None of them had anything to say to that except for Cho, who whispered, “I’m sorry.”

Krum shook his head. “I am making it sound very bad,” he said apologetically. “That is not how I mean it—complaining! I like doing things on my own, mostly. Is why I like flying Seeker so much, yes?”

They all grinned at that.

“Er—so, shall we fly?” Harry suggested.

“Yes,” Krum said firmly. “Come, I vill show you some of the drills ve do, and then you can show me some of yours, and ve vill see vhat we can learn from each other, yes?”

They all mounted-up hurriedly and shot into the air. Harry’s Firebolt outdistanced the others on initial acceleration, although Krum was only a second behind him, and the others caught up quickly. Draco had talked Madam Hooch into loaning them the Snitch that the Slytherin team used for practice, and after Krum checked to make sure that it was the same size and composition as the ones he was used to—“International standardization is a good thing for sports, I think,” he said sagely—he led the four Hogwarts students in the drills he and Bulgaria’s reserve Seeker had used in their preparations for the Quidditch World Cup.

Harry was tense at first, worried that he was going to do something to embarrass himself in front of Krum, and distracted by flying so close to Cho and Cedric. After he realized that neither of them were acting lovey-dovey now that they were up in the air, and that everyone was too eager to learn from each other to laugh when someone else made a mistake trying something new—even Draco—he relaxed. With the wind in his hair, his Firebolt in his hands, and four friendly Seekers beside him, Harry felt like he was right where he belonged.

It wasn’t until twilight closed-in thickly over the grounds, making the Golden Snitch all but impossible to spot, that they finally called it quits. “You were right,” Cho said to Cedric as the five of them touched-down on the damp grass, “this was definitely worth putting off homework for!”

She was windswept and grinning and Harry thought she had never looked prettier.

“Guess we’d better head in and get back to that now, huh?” said Cedric, smiling wryly. “It was a nice break, though. Thanks, Harry!”

Harry grinned and they turned to walk up to the school together. A warm sense of camaraderie had settled over the five of them while they flew and, despite most of them being from different houses—or even different schools—and often in competition with one another, Harry thought that he had rarely felt so comfortable with any group of people as he did tonight with his fellow Seekers.

“This vas a good idea, Potter,” Krum said, “Lots of fun.” He slapped Harry companionably on the back before he split off from the others to walk back to the Durmstrang ship alone. “Ve do it again maybe, yes?”

For the first time since Rita Skeeter’s article had appeared, Harry was glad that somebody had made the mistake of thinking that he and Hermione were dating. He hurried to catch up to Draco, Cho, and Cedric, wanting to enjoy that warm glow of fraternity for as long as possible before they split up to go back to their separate common rooms and start on the piles of homework waiting for them all.

 

The one good thing about having so much homework—and their workload was mounting ever higher in the days before the Easter holidays—was that no one, not even Pansy Parkinson, had enough free time to waste much of it teasing Harry about the girlfriend he didn’t have. He wasn’t sure how Hermione’s housemates were dealing with the rumors, but most of his had seemed to tire of the story quickly. He wasn’t sure how much of that was due to boredom or homework, and how much was due to Draco’s influence and the threat of Crabbe’s and Goyle’s fists, and he didn’t ask.

The important thing was that no one was bothering him much, which was good. Harry was working flat-out just to get through all their homework, though he made a point of sending regular food packages up to the cave in the mountain for Sirius; after last summer, Harry had not forgotten what it felt like to be continually hungry. He enclosed notes to Sirius, telling him that nothing out of the ordinary had happened, and that they were still waiting for an answer from Ron’s brother.

Hedwig didn’t return until the end of the Easter holidays. Harry saw her come soaring in to the Gryffindor table at lunch, and hurried over. He and Draco watched while Ron opened his mail; it looked like Percy’s letter had been enclosed in a package of Easter eggs that Mrs. Weasley had sent. Both Ron’s egg and those of his siblings were the size of dragon eggs and full of homemade toffee. There was an egg for Hermione, too, but hers was smaller than a chicken egg. Her face fell when she saw it.

“You mum doesn’t read _Witch Weekly_ , by any chance, does she, Ron?” she asked quietly.

“Yeah,” said Ron, whose mouth was full of toffee. “Gets it for the recipes.”

Hermione looked sadly at her tiny egg.

“Well?” said Harry impatiently. “Did your brother write back?”

Ron handed him the letter. It was short and irritated.

> _As I am constantly telling the_ Daily Prophet _, Mr. Crouch is taking a well-deserved break. He is sending in regular owls with instructions. No, I haven’t actually seen him, but I think I can be trusted to know my own superior’s handwriting. I have quite enough to do at the moment without trying to quash these ridiculous rumors. Please don’t bother me again unless it’s something important. Happy Easter._

“Pleasant fellow,” Draco murmured sarcastically. Ron grunted in absent-minded agreement.

 

The start of the summer term would normally have meant that Harry was training hard for the last Quidditch match of the season. This year, however, it was the third and final task in the Triwizard Tournament for which he needed to prepare, but he still didn’t know what he would have to do. Finally, in the last week of May, Professor McGonagall held him back in Transfiguration.

“You are to go down to the Quidditch field tonight at nine o’clock, Potter,” she told him. “Mr. Bagman will be there to tell the champions about the third task.”

So at half past eight that night, Harry left Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle in the Slytherin dungeon and went upstairs. As he mounted the staircase to the entrance hall, Cedric came around the corner from the Hufflepuff common room.

“What d’you reckon it’s going to be?” he asked Harry as they went together down the stone steps, out into the cloudy night. “Fleur keeps going on about underground tunnels; she reckons we’ve got to find treasure.”

“That wouldn’t be too bad,” said Harry, thinking that he would simply ask Hagrid for a niffler to do the job for him.

They walked down the dark lawn to the Quidditch stadium, turned through a gap in the stands, and walked out onto the field.

“What’ve they done to it?” Cedric said indignantly, stopping dead.

The Quidditch field was no longer smooth and flat. It looked as though somebody had been building long, low walls all over it that twisted and crisscrossed in every direction.

“They’re hedges!” said Harry, bending to examine the nearest one.

“Hello there!” called a cheery voice.

Ludo Bagman was standing in the middle of the field with Krum and Fleur. Harry and Cedric made their way toward them, climbing over the hedges. Fleur beamed at Harry as he came nearer. Her attitude toward him had changed completely since he had saved her sister from the lake.

“Well, what d’you think?” said Bagman happily as Harry and Cedric climbed over the last hedge. “Growing nicely, aren’t they? Give them a month and Hagrid’ll have them twenty feet high. Don’t worry,” he added, grinning, spotting the less-than-happy expressions on Harry’s and Cedric’s faces, “you’ll have your Quidditch field back to normal once the task is over! Now, I imagine you can guess what we’re making here?”

No one spoke for a moment. Then—

“Maze,” grunted Krum.

“That’s right!” said Bagman. “A maze. The third task’s really very straightforward. The Triwizard Cup will be placed in the center of the maze. The first champion to touch it will receive full marks.”

“We seemply ‘ave to get through the maze?” said Fleur.

“There will be obstacles,” said Bagman happily, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “Hagrid is providing a number of creatures…then there will be spells that must be broken…all that sort of thing, you know. Now, the champions who are leading on points will get a head start into the maze.” Bagman grinned at Harry and Cedric. “Then Mr. Krum will enter…then Miss Delacour. But you’ll all be in with a fighting chance, depending on how well you get past the obstacles. Should be fun, eh?”

Harry, who knew only too well the kind of creatures that Hagrid was likely to provide for an event like this, thought it was unlikely to be any fun at all. However, he nodded politely like the other champions.

“Very well…if you haven’t got any questions, we’ll go back up to the castle, shall we, it’s a bit chilly….”

Bagman hurried alongside Harry as they began to wend their way out of the growing maze. Harry had the feeling that Bagman was going to start offering to help him again, so he said quickly, “Excuse me, Mr. Bagman, but I think I’ll go and see Hagrid, if we’re done here. We’re old friends, you know, so he likes to hear how I’m doing in my other classes, talk to me about—er—about Quidditch and stuff, tell me about all the new creatures he’s found lately….” Harry grinned and hurried away before anyone could say anything to stop him.

Bagman looked slightly perturbed, but he brightened-up quickly when Harry mentioned talking about Hagrid’s new monsters, doubtless thinking that Harry was going to try and get some tips about the maze—which, Harry thought as he walked across the dark lawn, wasn’t a bad idea, although it seemed a little too much like cheating on purpose. It had been one thing for Hagrid to show him the dragons, when Harry hadn’t realized what he was doing; it would be something else altogether to deliberately ask Hagrid to tell him details about the third task. If Hagrid just happened to let something slip, though, well that would be different….

And this time, Harry vowed, he would keep anything he learned to himself. Sharing Seeker drills when there was no Quidditch Cup to worry about was one thing, but this was the final task in the Triwizard Tournament. If Harry wanted to win against three older and more experienced champions, he couldn’t afford to give away any advantages.

 

Hagrid was surprised but delighted to see Harry, and ushered him into his cabin and to one of the battered oversized chairs around the table. Fang the boarhound bounded around for several minutes, his exuberant barking making talk impossible, but he soon wore himself out and fell asleep across Harry’s feet. Hagrid served tea and he and Harry discussed the second task again, the nifflers they had been using in lessons, and the different spells and potions that Hagrid was using on the maze in order to inspire it to grow at the speed demanded by the tournament.

“I tell yeh, Harry,” Hagrid said, his black eyes twinkling, “it ain’t somethin’ yeh see often, but when Professors Sprout and Snape work together, they can sure cook up a doozy of a draught. A few drops o’ this” —he shook a metal can the size of a small child— “and yeh could grow jus’ abou’ anythin’ yeh wanted, don’ matter what the weather is….”

A bright light at the open window caught Harry’s eye, and he and Hagrid both turned in time to see a silvery bird soar inside. It landed on the table, turned to Hagrid, and said in Dumbledore’s calm voice, “Come at once—the edge of the Forbidden Forest! There is trouble.” Then the bird shrank on itself, pulsed once, and vanished into thin air.

Hagrid leapt to his feet while Harry was still gaping at the place where the bird had been. “Fang, come! Harry, stay ‘ere!” Hagrid shouted, grabbing his crossbow. The enormous boarhound lurched off of Harry’s feet and scrabbled out the door after Hagrid. Harry, pulling his wand from his pocket, followed on their heels.

Hagrid’s longer legs made short work of the distance, and Harry’s lungs burned from the effort of trying to keep up, but he still lagged several feet behind the gamekeeper by the time Hagrid and Fang reached the edge of the trees. Professor Dumbledore was there, his wand raised and lit, casting a silvery glow on the scene. He was standing next to Madame Maxime, whose great height cast everything behind her into shadow. She had one large hand on the shoulder of a very shaken Beauxbatons boy.

They all looked up when Hagrid approached, his thunderous footsteps announcing his presence long before he reached their sides, Fang loping along beside him. Harry lagged behind, trying to stay outside the circle of light emanating from Professor Dumbledore’s wand.

“Professor Dumbledore!” Hagrid said, his eyes narrowing at the sight of Madame Maxime. “What is it, sir? What’s the trouble?”

“Monsieur Berlioz here has been attacked,” Dumbledore said calmly, “apparently by Mr. Crouch, who is at large somewhere on the grounds. He appeared to be in some distress when he happened upon Monsieur Berlioz and Miss Stimpson some fifteen minutes ago. It is imperative that we find him quickly.”

“ _Oui_ ,” said Madame Maxime, her voice thick with fury. “This attack on one of my students cannot go unpunished, Dumbly-dorr!”

Dumbledore inclined his head politely. “I promise you that I have no intention of turning a blind eye to tonight’s events. Hagrid, if you will first kindly alert Professor Moody—”

“No need, Dumbledore,” said a wheezy growl. “I’m here.”

Moody was limping toward them, leaning on his staff, his wand lit.

“Damn leg,” he said furiously. “Would’ve been here quicker…what’s happened? Snape said something about Crouch—”

Harry opened his mouth to ask where Snape was, remembered that he didn’t want anyone to notice he was there and possibly send him away, and closed his mouth without speaking.

“I don’t know where Barty Crouch is,” Dumbledore told Moody, “but it is essential that we find him.”

“I’m onto it,” growled Moody, and he raised his wand and limped off into the forest.

“Hagrid, if you would join the search…?”

“Of course, Professor!” Hagrid said quickly, wrenching his gaze away from Madame Maxime, who was fussing over her student and pretending not to see him. “C’mon, Fang!” he said, and loped off into the dark tress, Fang trotting after him.

“I demand to know what is going on ‘ere, Dumbly-dorr!” Madame Maxime said in a heated voice.

Dumbledore’s voice, by contrast, was icy. “I assure you, Olympe, I am quite keen on getting to the bottom of this matter as well.”

Dumbledore’s eyes fastened suddenly on Harry, who had been trying to lurk at the edge of the circle of light, hoping not to be noticed. “What are you doing here, Harry?” Dumbledore asked, his voice tight.

“Er—I was visiting Hagrid,” Harry explained. “What happened?”

“That, I fear, is what we must hope to find out.” Dumbledore didn’t sound happy, but he didn’t scold Harry either.

“I don’t, um…I don’t have to leave, do I, professor?” Harry asked.

“I think it would be a very bad idea for you to go wondering off right now, Harry,” said Dumbledore. “No, we shall all stay right where we are, and wait for a resolution.” Harry stepped a little further into the circle of light, trying to resist the urge to look over his shoulder.

Berlioz, his eyes as wide and white as saucers in his dark face, asked, “Where is Patricia, _s’il vous plait? Est-ce qu'elle va bien?”_

“Miss Stimpson is unharmed,” Dumbledore said reassuringly. “I asked her to wait in my office. Professor Snape is looking after her.”

“ _Merci,”_ said Berlioz, and sidled closer to Madame Maxime, his gaze wondering anxiously back to the trees. After a while he said quietly, “Ze zings that zis Monsieur Crouch was saying…zey made no sense. I zink he perhaps is mad.”

“What was he saying?” Harry asked curiously, stepping closer.

Berlioz looked at him for the first time and frowned, and for a moment Harry thought that the Beauxbatons student was going to refuse to answer, but then he said, “Nonsense zings. ‘E was looking for Professor Dumbly-dorr, zat is why Patricia went to find ‘er ‘eadmaster, while I waited ‘ere with ze maddened man. At first we did not recognize ‘im, because ‘e looked so…ehh… _ébouriffé._ But zen Patricia, she said ‘e was ze uzzer judge from ze tournament tasks, and ‘e started…ehh… _délirer?”_

“Ranting and raving,” Dumbledore murmured quietly, when Harry looked at him in confusion. Dumbledore was watching Berlioz very closely, his bright eyes narrowed. His half-moon glasses glittered in the wandlight.

Berlioz nodded. “‘E fell over and could not get up again. ‘E did not seem to know who ‘e was talking to. Some of ze times ‘e talked to ze trees instead of to us, and told zem about plans with ‘is son and ‘is wife, and ze memos and zings ‘e needed for his work, looking for someone named Wezzurby and someone else named Berza, I zink maybe zey were both dead….” Berlioz’s voice dropped almost to whisper. “’E talked also about _Celui-Dont-On-Ne-Doit-Pas-Prononcer-Le-Nom—Seigneur Voldemort!”_

It was as if Berlioz had dropped a stone into the puddle of the black night; everything went very cold and quiet and Harry shuddered. Madame Maxime’s enormous hand tightened on her student’s shoulder and drew him closer against her side. Berlioz did not protest the protective embrace.

“And then Crouch attacked you?” Harry asked.

“’E must have,” Berlioz said, shrugging. “I turned around to see if Patricia was coming back yet, and ze next zing I know— _poof!_ I am on ze ground, waking up, with your Professor Dumbly-dorr bending over me.” He waved a hand at Dumbledore, but his eyes were still fixed on the trees, as though he was expecting to be attacked again.

“Yes,” said Madame Maxime, “and I wonder, Dumbly-dorr, eef you would ‘ave bozzured to send for me if I ‘ad not waved to you from our carriage as you passed by?”

Dumbledore inclined his head in another little bow. “Most certainly, Olympe,” he said. “I would never attempt to conceal from you an injury done to one of your students on the grounds of my school. If I seemed rushed and abrupt when you hailed me, it was only because I was in haste to reach Monsieur Berlioz and Mr. Crouch before anything unfortunate could befall either of them—alas, I was not quite quick enough.” His voice had gone very hard, and the look he gave the dark trees beside them was harder still.

“Hmph,” said Madame Maxime.

None of them spoke again until they heard the unmistakable sounds of Hagrid and Fang returning. Hagrid was puffing for breath as he came out of the forest, Fang’s tongue flopping wetly from his mouth as he loped at Hagrid’s heels. “There’s no sign of ‘im, Professor,” Hagrid said. “Me an’ Fang went all the way to the lake, and there ain’t any sign o’ anyone. Has Professor Moody come back yet?”

“No,” said Dumbledore, “but with luck he will have better news to report. Thank you, Hagrid.”

“I’ll keep lookin’, sir,” Hagrid began, but Dumbledore shook his head.

“I would rather have you escort Harry back up to the castle, Hagrid,” said Dumbledore. “I think he has been out here long enough tonight. Olympe, perhaps you and young Berlioz should also retire? He has had quite an eventful evening, after all. We will continue to search for Mr. Crouch and I promise you, the moment I discover anything, I will send word.”

Madame Maxime looked down at Dumbledore with a very unhappy expression on her lovely olive-skinned face, but eventually she jerked her head in a curt nod. “You are correct,” she said, “it ‘as been a difficult night. Come, Berlioz, let us get you back to safer quarters and make sure zat you are all right.”

“Could I—could I let Patricia know, do you zink…?” Berlioz ventured, but Madame Maxime shook her head firmly.

“ _Mais non,”_ she said. “It is straight to bed for you, I zink! You should never ‘ave been out ‘ere sneaking around in ze trees to begin with!”

Berlioz’s cheeks darkened and he mumbled something unintelligible.

“I shall see to it that Miss Stimpson is informed,” Professor Dumbledore said kindly. “Hagrid, I want you to take Harry straight down to the Slytherin Dungeon. Once he is safely inside, please go up to my office and inform Miss Stimpson of the pertinent facts of the evening, then send her back to Gryffindor Tower. After that, I would like you to return and assist me in searching the grounds further. Bring Professor Snape with you; he can look as well. And Harry—” Dumbledore turned and caught Harry’s eyes with his own bright blue ones. “Once back in the dungeons, I want you to stay there. Anything you might want to do—any owls you might want to send—they can wait until morning, do you understand me?”

“Er—yes,” said Harry, staring at him. How had Dumbledore known that, at that very momepnt, he had been thinking about sending a school owl straight to Sirius, to tell him what had happened?

“I’ll leave Fang with yeh, Headmaster,” Hagrid said, loftily pretending not to see Madame Maxime, who was chivying poor Berlioz off in the direction of the Beauxbatons carriage. “Stay, Fang. C’mon, Harry.”

They marched in silence past the Beauxbatons carriage and up toward the castle.

“The nerve ‘o her,” Hagrid grumbled as they strode past the lake. “Makin’ it out like Dumbledore wouldn’t’ve tol’ her that one o’ her students was hurt…when she’s the one goin’ ‘round keepin’ secrets, bein’ embarrassed o’ the truth…. Like Dumbledore’d do anything like that. He ain’t a man fer hidin’ the truth, Professor Dumbledore…for denyin’ what he is…. An’ you!” Hagrid suddenly said anxiously to Harry, who looked up at him, taken aback. “What were yeh doin’ comin’ down ter see me all by yerself? Yeh shouldn’t go wanderin’ aroun’ like that, Harry! It’s too dangerous after dark, what with so many strangers at ‘Ogwarts right now. Hasn’ Moody taught yeh nothing’? ‘Magine what Karkaroff what like ter do, if he get his hands on yeh wonderin’ aroun’ out here by yerself…. I bet any o’ them Durmstrang students would be glad ter do their headmaster a favor an’ knock yeh out o’ the tournament too, none o’ them want yeh in it ter begin with…bet Krum’d be quick enough with his wand, he saw yeh sneakin’ past that ship o’ theirs….”

“Krum’s all right!” said Harry as they climbed the steps into the entrance hall. “Hagrid, I eat with the Durmstrang students every day, they all are, they’re fine!”

“An’ don’ think I won’t be talkin’ ter Professor Dumbledore abou’ that later,” said Hagrid grimly, stomping up the stairs. “They can jus’ go back ter their ship ter eat, you ask me. The less you lot ‘ave ter do with these foreigners, the happier yeh’ll be. Yeh can’ trust any of ‘em.”

“You were getting on all right with Madame Maxime,” Harry said, annoyed.

“Don’ you talk ter me abou’ her!” said Hagrid, and he looked quite frightening for a moment. “I’ve got her number now! Tryin’ ter get back in me good books, tryin’ ter get me ter tell her what’s comin’ in the third task. Ha! You can’ trust any of ‘em!”

Hagrid was in such a bad mood, Harry was quite glad to say good-bye to him outside the secret entrance in the dungeon wall. He hurried through the archway into the common room and hurried straight for the corner where Draco and his friends were sitting, to tell them what had happened.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for the delay in getting this chapter up. As you may or may not have seen in the comments for the previous chapter, my laptop died. I managed to resuscitate it and hope to be able to continue posting regularly from now on. However, I do fear that it may be on its last legs and so I am going to be making an effort to procure a new one. To that end, I will be offering short stories of the prompt/character/ship of your choice in exchange for a donation to the laptop-purchasing cause. If you are interested, you can [contact me here](https://greeneyedsnake.tumblr.com/post/176681190602/posting-status-update). Regardless, thank you for your support all along in the form of comments and kudos, and let me apologize in advance if this laptop gives up the ghost before I've managed to get my hands on a replacement (you'll know because the updates will suddenly stop again, whoops!). Cross your fingers for me!


	26. The Dream

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This section contains a few sporadic excerpt chunks drawn from Chapter Twenty-Nine, which encompasses pages 564 to 580 of the American hardcover edition.

“So the question,” Draco said, frowning thoughtfully, “is whether it was Crouch who attacked that Beauxbatons boy, or if it was somebody else who got them both.”

“But how’d Crouch get away after they attacked him?” Crabbe asked.

“Coulda Dis’parated,” Goyle suggested, yawning hugely.

“I don’t think so,” said Harry, shaking his head. “The way Berlioz was talking, it didn’t sound like Crouch was up for much of anything—I mean, talking to trees and falling over?”

Draco rolled his eyes. “Besides, you can’t Apparate directly to or from Hogwarts, you moron,” he sneered, poking Goyle in one meaty shoulder. “Even you ought to know that.”

“Oh,” said Goyle. “Right.”

It was daybreak. Harry, Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle had crept out of their dormitory very early and hurried up to the Owlery together to send a note to Sirius. Now they were standing looking out at the misty grounds. All four of them were puffy-eyed and pale because they had been talking late into the night about Mr. Crouch.

“I bet it was that Beauxbatons boy,” Crabbe said, cracking his knuckles. “I bet he did for Crouch, then hexed himself so nobody’d suspect.”

“And what did he _do_ with Crouch afterward?” Draco asked scathingly. “Feed him to the giant squid?”

Crabbe frowned. “Maybe,” he said.

“I’m pretty sure the giant squid doesn’t eat people,” Harry said, “and even so, I can’t picture Berlioz dragging Crouch all the way to the lake without being seen by somebody.”

“Oh,” said Crabbe, sounding disappointed.

“The most likely explanation is that it was Crouch,” Draco said, drumming his fingers on the thick stone windowsill. “Why complicate things? He was there, he went ‘round the twist, he attacked this Berlioz and then he scarpered. Makes more sense than some random person coming up, hexing Berlioz, and stealing Crouch away someplace else.”

“I guess so,” said Harry, unconvinced. “But why? If Crouch was in such a fervor to get to Dumbledore, why leave?”

Harry turned away from the window and stared up into the rafters. The many perches were half-empty; every now and then, another owl would swoop in through one of the windows, returning from its night’s hunting with a mouse in its beak.

“I don’t know,” Draco said, “I think I’d rather run off than speak to that old coot, if I had a choice.”

Crabbe and Goyle snickered.

“I wonder if Hagrid or Moody found anything,” said Harry, ignoring Draco. “D’you think there’s time to go down to Hagrid’s hut and ask him before lessons?”

“I ain’t missing breakfast,” Goyle said hurriedly, and Crabbe nodded fervent agreement.

“Doubt it,” said Draco, shrugging, “and anyway, if Hagrid was up half the night searching the grounds, he isn’t likely to be awake earlier than he has to be, is he? It’s not like he spends a lot of time on grooming himself before his classes, I bet he’ll roll out of bed just in time to meet the first one with whatever monster he’s brought along this time….”

“What about Moody?” Goyle asked. “D’you think he sleeps?”

“Don’t be an idiot, Goyle,” Draco said, “everybody sleeps.”

“Oh,” said Goyle. He frowned. “What about that see-everything-eye of his? D’you think that sleeps?”

“I wonder if Moody thought to use the Marauder’s Map,” Harry said. “If he had that with him, finding Crouch should have been easy.”

“Unless Crouch made it past the edges of the map’s coverage before Moody got there,” said Draco. “It doesn’t show the forest, or the path to Hogsmeade, just the school grounds out to—”

“Someone’s coming,” Crabbe announced suddenly. The others fell silent, listening.

Somebody was climbing the steps up to the Owlery. Harry could hear two voices arguing, coming closer and closer.

“—that’s blackmail, that is, we could get into a lot of trouble for that—”

“—we’ve tried being polite; it’s time to play dirty, like him. He wouldn’t like the Ministry of Magic knowing what he did—”

“I’m telling you, if you put that in writing, it’s blackmail!”

“Yeah, and you won’t be complaining if we get a nice fat payoff, will you?”

The Owlery door banged open. Fred and George Weasley came over the threshold, then froze at the sight of Harry, Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle.

“What’re you doing here?” Draco said at the same time as one of the twins.

“Sending a letter,” said Harry and the other one, also in unison.

“What, at this time?” said Draco and the twin who had spoken first.

Weasley scowled. “Just bugger off, you lot; it’s none of your business what we’re doing, and we don’t much care what you’re up to either.”

He was holding a sealed envelope in his hands. Harry glanced at it, but the Weasley twin, whether accidentally or on purpose, shifted his hand so that the name on it was covered.

“Don’t let the door hit you on the way out,” the other Weasley said coldly, pointing at the door.

Harry and his friends didn’t move. “We’ve as much right to be up here as you,” Draco sneered.

“Come on,” said Harry, under his breath; he had been enjoying having a year without the Weasley twins plaguing him, and he didn’t want to encourage them to resume their attentions now. He had enough on his plate with the Triwizard Tournament and the Dark Mark and now Mr. Crouch’s disappearance as well.

“Fine,” huffed Draco, “it’s probably something really pathetic anyway. Begging some elderly relative for money, I bet.” He let Harry pull him down the stairs, although he exchanged icy glares with the twins as they shuffled past. Crabbe and Goyle trudged after them, Crabbe cracking his knuckles anticipatorily and Goyle swinging his long, gorilla-ish arms, loosening up his muscles just in case—but neither twin moved, just stood there watching them leave.

“D’you think they know something about Crouch?” Goyle asked as they trooped into the Great Hall.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Draco said. “Those two idiots? What could they possibly know?”

“Dunno,” said Goyle. He brightened. “Maybe they’re the ones who done him!”

“Sure,” said Harry sarcastically, rolling his eyes, “attacking a member of the Ministry sounds right up their alley.”

“Thought so,” said Goyle smugly, dolling a generous helping of scrambled eggs and stewed tomatoes onto his plate. “Think we should tell Snape?”

The others ignored him.

“I think we should talk to Moody,” Harry said.

Draco shuddered. “Whatever for?” he said.

“To see if he found Crouch,” said Harry. “You don’t have to come if you’re scared….”

“No—no, of course I’m not scared,” Draco said quickly. “But all the same, we should probably wait until morning break. If Moody was out searching until all hours, we don’t want to startle him awake. He’d probably react—er—badly.” He swallowed hard.

Harry might have teased his friend, except he thought Draco had a point. Better to wait until they were sure Moody was awake before they knocked on his door—just to be safe.

Charms—ordinarily a very interesting class—had never gone so slowly. Harry kept checking Draco’s watch, having finally discarded his own, but Draco’s was moving so slowly he could have sworn it had stopped working too. All four of them were so tired that they could have happily put their heads down on their desks and slept; for the first time, Harry wished that Charms was more of a lecture class than a practical one. He would have preferred dozing in his seat and pretending to take notes to having to stand and practice the Blindfolding Charm, which might have been entertaining under other circumstances, as it led to half the class at a time wandering around with their hands outstretched in front of them, blundering into desks, chairs, and other students until Professor Flitwick lifted the effects so they could switch-off with their partners. The classroom was full of thumps, thuds, and giggles as students tripped over each other, but Harry and his friends kept yawning mid-incantation.

When the bell finally rang, they hurried out into the corridors toward the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom and found Professor Moody leaving it. He looked as tired as they felt. The eyelid of his normal eye was drooping, giving his face an even more lopsided appearance than usual.

“Professor Moody?” Harry called as they made their way toward him through the crowd. He pretended that he couldn’t see Draco cowering, trying to keep out of sight behind the others.

“Hello, Potter,” growled Moody. His magical eye followed a couple of passing first years, who sped up, looking nervous; it rolled into the back of Moody’s head and watched them around the corner before he spoke again.

“Come in here.”

He stood back to let them into his empty classroom, limped in after them, and closed the door.

“Did you find him?” Harry asked without preamble. “Mr. Crouch?”

“No,” said Moody. He moved over to his desk, sat down, stretched out his wooden leg with a slight groan, and pulled out his hip flask.

“Did you use the map?” Harry said.

“Of course,” said Moody, taking a swig from his flask. “Took a leaf out of your book, Potter. Summoned it from my office into the forest. He wasn’t anywhere on there.”

“He couldn’ta Dis’pparated, though,” Goyle piped-up cheerfully, “’cause you can’t do that at Hogwarts.”

Draco rolled his eyes.

Moody’s magical eye quivered as it rested on Goyle. “Well observed,” he said, sounding slightly shocked.

Goyle beamed.

“Well, he wasn’t invisible,” said Harry. “The map shows invisible people. He must’ve left the grounds, then.”

“Obviously,” said Draco; not even his fear of Moody could make him keep quiet when he thought someone else was being stupid. “We know he left, because he wasn’t there. The question is whether it was his choice to go, and how he went—and, I suppose, where.”

“I still think it was the giant squid,” Crabbe grumbled under his breath. The others ignored him.

“D’you think somebody might have followed him to Hogwarts?” Harry asked. “Maybe they were just waiting for a chance to snatch him, and figured that Stunning Berlioz was worth the risk, to get him out of there before he could talk to Dumbledore.”

“Could have been,” said Moody. “Or it could have been someone who was here, waiting for him.”

Harry stared at Moody. “You think someone knew he was coming?” he asked.

Moody yawned widely, so that his scars stretched, and his lopsided mouth revealed a number of missing teeth. Then he said, “Don’t have to have known he was coming to have been waiting. They could have just been waiting for trouble in general.”

“Constant vigilance,” Draco muttered sourly.

Moody’s magical eye flicked toward him and then quickly away again. “I’m not the only one around here who’s been keeping an eye out,” he said grimly. “Karkaroff—Maxime—even Dumbledore; they all know there’s something amiss, and so do a lot of the other teachers. Someone put your name in that goblet, Potter, and that means that someone at Hogwarts means you ill. Now, maybe it’s one of the visiting heads, or maybe it’s someone who’s been here all along—but somebody is out to get you, that much is clear.”

Harry swallowed. “I know,” he said, thinking of his dream about Voldemort and Wormtail.

“Well, what you have to do is foil their plans by staying alive. And that means keeping your nose out of things that don’t concern you, and paying attention to the things that do. There’s nothing you can do about Crouch. The Ministry’ll be looking for him now, Dumbledore’s notified them. Potter, you just keep your mind on the third task.”

“What?” said Harry. “Oh yeah…”

He hadn’t given the maze a single thought since he’d left Hagrid’s hut the previous night.

“Should be more up your alley, this one,” said Moody, looking up at Harry and scratching his scarred and stubbly chin. “Not afraid of a bit of danger, are you? Dumbledore’s told me about your antics with the dementors last year, and you going down into the Chamber of Secrets before that….”

Harry flinched, as he always did when the Chamber of Secrets was mentioned; he still felt guilty over dragging his friends into danger, even though it had turned out all right in the end.

“We was there for that too,” Goyle pointed out.

Moody grinned.

“Well, stick close to him this time too,” he said. “I meant what I said to you before the first task: it’s good to have somebody watching your back. There’s nothing like having allies you know you can rely on, nothing.” His normal eye flashed with a sudden, fierce gleam, and he cleared his throat hastily. “In the meantime…Malfoy’s right. Constant vigilance, Potter. Constant vigilance.” He took another long draw from his hip flask, and his magical eye swiveled onto the window. The topmost sail of the Durmstrang ship was visible through it.

“You three,” counseled Moody, his normal eye on Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle, “you stick close to Potter, all right? I’m keeping an eye on things, but all the same…you can never have too many eyes out.”

> Sirius sent their owl back the very next morning. It fluttered down beside Harry at the same moment that a screech owl landed in front of Theodore Nott, clutching a copy of the _Daily Prophet_ in its beak. Draco leaned over, exclaiming, “Let me have a look at that!” snatching the newspaper away before Theodore could speak. He flipped through the first few pages quickly before handing it back, saying, “Oh good—doesn’t look like Skeeter’s heard about Crouch. She’d have had a field day with that one: ‘Triwizard judge goes mad, attacks student from competing school….’” He shook his head, smirking, then joined Harry in reading what Sirius had to say on the mysterious events of the night before last.
> 
> _Harry – what do you think you are playing at,_ _walking around the grounds alone at night?_ _I want you to swear, by return owl, that you are not going to_ _leave the school alone again, especially after dark._ _There is somebody highly dangerous at Hogwarts. It is clear to me that they wanted to stop Crouch from seeing Dumbledore and_ _you were right out there in the open with them, totally exposed._ _You could have been killed._
> 
> _Your name didn’t get into the Goblet of Fire by accident. If someone’s trying to attack you, they’re on their last chance. Stay close to_ _your friends_ _, do not leave_ _your common room_ _after hours, and arm yourself for the third task. Practice Stunning and Disarming. A few hexes wouldn’t go amiss either. There’s nothing you can do about Crouch. Keep your head down and look after yourself. I’m waiting for your letter giving me your word you won’t stray out-of-bounds again._
> 
> _Sirius_

 “Who’s he, to lecture me about being out-of-bounds?” said Harry in mild indignation as he folded up Sirius’s letter and put it inside his robes. “After all the stuff he did at school!”

“Not to mention going on the run from the Ministry of Magic and hiding out in a cave just outside Hogsmeade,” Draco pointed out.

“Exactly!” said Harry. “And nobody’s tried to attack me all year. No one’s done anything to me at all except put my name in the Goblet of Fire—”

Draco snorted quietly, but Harry ignored him.

“—and that hasn’t turned out too badly, yet.” He started mashing his roast potatoes into a lumpy paste. “Let’s even say that Sirius is right, and someone Stunned Berlioz to kidnap Crouch. Well, they _would’ve_ been in the trees, maybe even watching us the whole time Hagrid and Moody were searching. If they’d wanted to get me, it would have been easy to stick around and attack me, too—or even just follow me to Hagrid’s, I was all alone on my way there. But they didn’t go after me, did they? Just Crouch. So it doesn’t look like I’m their target, does it?”

But Draco’s smirk was fading. “Could have,” he allowed dubiously, “but if the whole point is to make something bad happen to you that looks like an accident, then coming right out and attacking you wouldn’t fit with their plans, would it?”

Harry frowned at his friend. “Whose side are you on?” he demanded.

“How about the side that doesn’t get you killed?” said Draco sharply.

“Fine,” said Harry, grabbing for parchment and a quill so he could write back to Sirius, “be that way.”

 

The Hogwarts grounds never looked more inviting than when Harry had to stay indoors. For the next few days he spent all of his free time either in the library with Draco, looking up hexes while Crabbe and Goyle dozed, or else in empty classrooms, which they sneaked into to practice. Harry was concentrating on the Disarming Spell, which Draco insisted was a weak choice, but Harry thought that if someone was trying to attack him, knowing how to take their wand away would be about the most useful spell he could learn.

He had discovered that most wizards—Crabbe and Goyle excepted, of course—were unaccustomed to physical fights. It seemed to be inversely proportional, how dangerous someone was with a wand versus how incompetent they were with their fists (at least if Draco was any indication, and since Draco claimed to be the best of their year at dueling, Harry was inclined to use him as an example). Harry knew that he wasn’t much good at a fistfight either, but after a decade of being used as Dudley’s favorite punching bag, at least he knew how to take a hit and get back up again. Hexes were a lot harder to shake-off.

“It’s just such a…a _harmless_ spell,” Draco complained, walking across the room to fetch his wand for the seventh time that morning. “I mean, it doesn’t actually _do_ anything to the person you’re aiming at, it just knocks whatever they’re holding out of their hands….”

“Good enough for me,” Harry said. “If they don’t have their wand, they can’t curse me with it.”

“And what about all the monsters and stuff that Hagrid is supposed to have put in this maze?” Draco asked. “Disarming _them_ won’t do you any good; most of them, their weapons will be part of them. You can’t take away someone’s claws, or—or fangs, or tentacles….”

“Tentacles?” Goyle looked up from the homework that he was pretending to do with Crabbe while the others practiced the Disarming Charm. “Ooh, is he gonna have to fight the giant squid?”

Draco rolled his eyes. “The last task was the one in the lake, Goyle,” he said scathingly. “This one is going to be on dry land. How is the giant squid supposed to get to Harry when he’s on the Quidditch pitch?”

Goyle frowned thoughtfully. “Well, they call him the _giant_ squid,” he said. “So that means he’s got real _long_ tentacles, right? Maybe he’ll just _stretch_ ….”

Draco snorted and turned back to Harry. “Come on,” he said, “you’re a natural at this one. Let’s try something more _interesting_ now, shall we?”

Draco’s father had responded to his son’s request for assistance with a list of spells, and he and Harry were trying them out one by one. Harry was a little nervous about some of them, but he had to admit that they certainly looked like the sort of things that would be useful against monsters. “All right,” he said, trying to sound calm. “Let’s start with the Impediment Curse. Slows down anything trying to get to you….”

Draco made a face. “Are you _ever_ going to practice any of the offensive spells?” he asked, but he was already waving Crabbe and Goyle to their feet. The two burly boys weren’t much good at wandwork, but when it came to someone to practice hexes on, Harry couldn’t have asked for better assistants. No matter how uncomfortable the spell that Harry (or Draco, because he said that the only way to _properly_ assist Harry was to learn all the spells as well, so he could help him better) was trying-out, they obediently stepped forward at Draco’s command and let Harry try it on them.

He had spent a whole afternoon Stunning and reviving Crabbe and Goyle over and over; while Harry had taken the blame for Stunning Professor Flitwick last year, it had actually been Draco who had cast the spell. Nonetheless, Harry had struggled with it ever since. He suspected that it was guilt at their attacking the Charms teacher that kept tripping him up, but after Stunning both Crabbe and Goyle half a dozen times each, he felt a lot more confident.

“All right,” Draco said, waving Goyle forward first, “just try and run toward Harry, and we’ll see if he can slow you down….”

They only managed to try the spell a few times before the bell rang. Since Harry was still a bit nervous of annoying Professor Sprout, on account of Cedric being the other Hogwarts champion, he refused to skip Herbology, so they collected their things and trooped off to the greenhouse. The sky outside was so brightly blue it looked as though it had been enameled.

“It’s going to be boiling in that glass-plated hothouse,” Draco complained. “I don’t see why Sprout never lets us open any of the windows….”

“That would kind of defeat the purpose of a greenhouse, wouldn’t it?” Harry said, smirking.

Crabbe chuckled and Draco shot Harry a nasty look as they fell into step with the rest of the Slytherins and Ravenclaws trooping across the lawn.

Draco was right: it was sweltering inside the greenhouse. Professor Sprout set them in groups of four, which was convenient for Harry and his friends, and put them to work picking fat white Soporis Aphids off of her collection of Honking Daffodils. “Careful not to squeeze them, now!” Sprout warned. “Pinch too hard and you’ll burst the little buggers. Their fumes have a soporific effect, so if you start getting drowsy, raise your hand and I’ll come around and clear the air around your table.” She swirled her wand in a quick spell that accomplished much the same thing as a Muggle electric fan, although in a more concentrated area, making Daphne and Morag giggle as she sent their long hair flapping in the breeze.

Harry couldn’t imagine how anyone could nod-off with a dozen Honking Daffodils blaring in their ears. The irritable, bright yellow plants soon had his teeth on edge. Every time someone jostled a plant, it protested by releasing a harsh blast of noise, making half the class jump and causing them to disturb the plants they were trying to prune, which in turn set off the rest of the noisy flowers. More than a few people squeezed too hard when a Honking Daffodil startled them, and Professor Sprout was kept busy darting around the greenhouse and blowing the cloying purple fumes away. She had opened the little windows under the eaves, but while that seemed to please the local insects who now buzzed around the glass-enclosed room happily, attracted by the tantalizing smell of the Honking Daffodils, it did little to cool the greenhouse down, and Harry was soon sweating through his robes.

He eyed Draco, wondering why his friend hadn’t started complaining about the uncomfortable conditions yet, and saw that his head was pillowed on his arms and he was snoozing in between two particularly large and raucous flowers. Harry snorted and yawned. He thought he should probably call Professor Sprout over to their table—Crabbe and Goyle were particularly brusque in their handling of the aphids, and had popped more than their share—but raising his hand seemed like a lot of effort. His eyelids began to droop….

He was riding on the back of an eagle owl, soaring through the clear blue sky toward an old, ivy-covered house set high on a hillside. Lower and lower they flew, the wind blowing pleasantly in Harry’s face, until they reached a dark and broken window in the upper story of the house and entered. Now they were flying along a gloomy passageway, to a room at the very end…through the door they went, into a dark room whose windows were boarded up….

Harry had left the owl’s back…he was watching, now, as it fluttered across the room, into a chair with its back to him…. There were two dark shapes on the floor beside the chair…both of them were stirring….

One was a huge snake…the other was a man…a short, balding man, a man with watery eyes and a pointed nose…he was wheezing and sobbing on the hearth rug….

“You are in luck, Wormtail,” said a cold, high-pitched voice from the depths of the chair in which the owl had landed. “You are very fortunate indeed. Your blunder has not ruined everything. He is dead.”

“My Lord!” gasped the man on the floor. “My Lord, I am…I am so pleased…and so sorry….”

“Nagini,” said the cold voice, “you are out of luck. I will not be feeding Wormtail to you, after all…but never mind, never mind…there is still Harry Potter….”

The snake hissed. Harry could see its tongue fluttering.

“Now, Wormtail,” said the cold voice, “perhaps one more little reminder why I will not tolerate another blunder from you….”

“My Lord…no…I beg you…”

The tip of the wand emerged from around the back of the chair. It was pointing at Wormtail.

“ _Crucio!”_ said the cold voice.

Wormtail screamed, screamed as though every nerve in his body were on fire, the screaming filled Harry’s ears as the scar on his forehead seared with pain; he was yelling too…. Voldemort would hear him, would know he was there….

“Harry, Harry wake up! _Potter!”_

Harry opened his eyes. He was lying on the dirty floor of Professor Sprout’s greenhouse with his hands over his face. There were shards of broken crockery next to him, and a daffodil honking right in his ear. His scar was still burning so badly that his eyes were watering. The pain had been real. The whole class was staring at him, some of them standing alongside the windows, the rest leaning across the tables full of flowers for a look. No one seemed to be paying the noisy flowers any attention. Draco was kneeling next to him, looking terrified, for once completely oblivious to the dirt on his robes.

“Are y—are you all right?” he asked in a shaky voice.

“I should say not!” Professor Sprout said, gently pushing gaping students aside so she could reach Harry. “I’d say you’d just had a nightmare, but the drowsiness brought on by Soporis Aphids is a complacent sort of lethargy, and the only dreams people ever report after falling under their effects are simple, cheerful things…you weren’t bit by anything, were you, Potter?” she asked, pushing his damp hair aside to feel his forehead. “An unfamiliar bug, or a plant? There shouldn’t be anything else in those pots aside from the daffodils—they’re tetchy, jealous growths, caterwauling if so much as a blade of grass gets too close to them—but maybe one of the aphids’ predators?” She pushed up the sleeves of his robes and felt his wrists, checking for bites or boils, smearing black dirt across his brown skin with her trembling hands.

“I’m fine,” lied Harry, pulling away from her. He sat up. He could feel himself shaking. He couldn’t stop himself from looking around, through the blurry panes of glass behind him; Voldemort’s voice had sounded so close….

“Was it—was it your scar, Potter?” Professor Sprout asked, lowering her voice. “You were clutching your head, rolling on the floor (lucky you didn’t roll across a pair of shears or clippers!) right above your eye, where the…where the scar is….?” Her round face looked worried and pale beneath the streak of dirt across her forehead.

Harry looked up at her.

“I need to go to the hospital wing, I think,” he said. “Bad headache.”

Professor Sprout’s eyebrows raised, but she pushed herself to her feet and leaned down to help Harry up. “Well, it’s probably not a bad idea to have Madam Pomfrey look you over,” she said, still looking worried. “But I don’t want you walking all the way up there alone.” She looked around, ignoring Draco’s quickly-raised hand, and said, “Miss Moon—escort Potter to the Hospital Wing, if you please.”

“That isn’t necessary,” Harry tried to protest, but Professor Sprout ignored him.

“I’m not going to have you toppling over in the middle of the staircase, Potter,” she said briskly, “but if I leave this lot here unsupervised, we’ll have the whole class napping in five minutes…no, off you go, the both of you. Mr. Malfoy, Miss Bulstrode, you can take their things up to your next class if they aren’t back before the bell rings….”

With no other choice, Harry left the greenhouse with Lilian Moon at his side. “You don’t have to come all the way up there with me,” Harry told her as they mounted the steps into the entrance hall. “I’ll be fine, honest.”

Lilian shrugged. Her hair today was a vivid, poisonous green; Harry wondered if she had charmed it that color in anticipation of the third task to show support for him, the Slytherin champion. “It’s no bother,” she assured Harry. “It’s on the way to History of Magic, so I’d have to go that way regardless.”

Harry swore under his breath and led the way to the main staircase. He had no intention whatsoever of going to the hospital wing, which meant he had only one flight of steps in which to ditch Lilian. Thinking quickly, he clutched the banister at the top of the stairs, let his eyes roll back in his head, and sank to the floor. Lilian, her thin brown eyes going wide, crouched next to him. “Harry—Harry, are you all right?” she squeaked. “Are you—?”

“I’m—okay,” Harry said, gritting his teeth as though speaking were painful. “Just…having some trouble…I don’t suppose you’d be willing to go and get Professor Moody, would you?” he asked, with a sudden flash of brilliance. “Tell him…tell him I need help, I think I’ve been attacked….”

Lilian frowned worriedly. “Are you sure you don’t want me to go get Madam Pomfrey?” she said, looking over her shoulder. “The hospital wing is just down the hall….”

Harry shook his head. “No,” he said, “Professor Moody…please, hurry…it hurts so much….”

Nodding hurriedly, Lilian jumped to her feet. “Okay!” she said. “I’ll be—I’ll be right back! Just…just stay there, Harry, okay?”

Harry waited until the sound of her frantic footsteps had faded away up the next flight of stairs, then scrambled back to his feet. He had to move fast, but he knew where he had to go, although he would have to take the long way around to avoid passing Lilian on his way up to the seventh floor.

Sirius had told him what to do if his scar hurt him again, and Harry was going to follow his advice: He was going straight to Dumbledore’s office. He sprinted down the corridors, thinking about what he had seen in the dream…it had been as vivid as the one that had awoken him on Privet Drive…. He ran over the details in his mind, trying to make sure he could remember them…. He had heard Voldemort accusing Wormtail of making a blunder…but the owl had brought good news, the blunder had been repaired, somebody was dead…so Wormtail was not going to be fed to the snake…he, Harry, was going to be fed to it instead….

Harry had run right past the stone gargoyle guarding the entrance to Dumbledore’s office without noticing. He blinked, looked around, realized what he had done, and retraced his steps, stopping in front of it. Then he remembered that he didn’t know the password.

“Le—lemon drop?” he panted.

The gargoyle did not move.

“Okay,” said Harry, staring at it, “Pear Drop. Er—Licorice Wand. Fizzing Whizbee. Drooble’s Best Blowing Gum. Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans…oh no, he doesn’t like them, does he?...oh just open, can’t you?” he said angrily. “I really need to see him, it’s urgent!”

The gargoyle remained immovable.

Harry kicked it, achieving nothing but an excruciating pain in his big toe.

“Chocolate Frog!” he yelled angrily, standing on one leg. Where were Crabbe and Goyle when he needed their expertise? There wasn’t a candy in the whole Wizarding world whose name they couldn’t rattle off at the slightest provocation. “Sugar Quill! Cockroach Cluster!”

The gargoyle sprang to life and jumped aside. Harry blinked.

“Cockroach Cluster?” he said, amazed. “I was only joking….”

He hurried through the gap in the walls and stepped onto the foot of a spiral stone staircase, which moved slowly upward as the doors closed behind him, taking him up to a polished oak door with a brass door knocker.

He could hear voices from inside the office. He stepped off the moving staircase and hesitated, listening.

“Dumbledore, I’m afraid I don’t see the connection, don’t see it at all!” It was the voice of the Minister of Magic, Cornelius Fudge. “Ludo says Bertha’s perfectly capable of getting herself lost. I agree we would have expected to have found her by now, but all the same, we’ve no evidence of foul play, Dumbledore, none at all. As for her disappearance being linked with Barty Crouch’s!”

“And what do you think’s happened to Barty Crouch, Minister?” said Moody’s growling voice.

“I see two possibilities, Alastor,” said Fudge. “Either Crouch has finally cracked—more than likely, I’m sure you’ll agree, given his personal history—lost his mind, and gone wandering off somewhere—”

“He wandered extremely quickly, if that is the case, Cornelius,” said Dumbledore calmly.

“Or else—well…” Fudge sounded embarrassed. “Well, I’ll reserve judgment until after I’ve seen the place where he was found, but you say it was just past the Beauxbatons carriage? And it was one of the Beauxbatons students who found him, and who claimed to have been attacked by Crouch? Dumbledore, you know what that woman _is?”_

“I consider her to be a very able headmistress—and an excellent dancer,” said Dumbledore quietly.

“Dumbledore, come!” said Fudge angrily. “Don’t you think you might be prejudiced in her favor because of Hagrid? They don’t all turn out harmless—if, indeed, you can call Hagrid harmless, with that monster fixation he’s got—”

“I no more suspect Madame Maxime than Hagrid,” said Dumbledore, just as calmly. “I think it is possible that it is you who are prejudiced, Cornelius.”

“Can we wrap up this discussion?” growled Moody.

“Yes, yes, let’s go down to the grounds, then,” said Fudge impatiently.

“No, it’s not that,” said Moody, “it’s just that Potter wants a word with you, Dumbledore. He’s just outside the door.”


	27. The Pensieve

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This section contains a number of sustained excerpts from Chapter Thirty, reaching from page 581 to page 604 of the American hardcover edition. However, the scenes within the Pensieve itself have been truncated to avoid unnecessary repetition, since none of those long-past elements would have been affected by Harry’s sorting into Slytherin; if you are curious about the omitted details, please refer to the original to refresh your memory.
> 
> **If you are an American of eighteen years of age or older, GO VOTE. You may read this chapter as a reward afterward. Good luck to us all!**

The door of the office opened.

“Hello, Potter,” said Moody. “Come in, then.”

Harry walked inside. He had been inside Dumbledore’s office before; it was a beautiful, circular room, lined with pictures of previous headmasters and headmistresses of Hogwarts, all of whom were fast asleep, their chests rising and falling gently.

Cornelius Fudge was standing behind Dumbledore’s desk, wearing his usual pinstriped cloak and holding his lime-green bowler hat.

“Harry!” said Fudge jovially, moving forward. “How are you?”

“Fine,” Harry lied.

“We were just talking about the night when Mr. Crouch turned up on the grounds,” said Fudge. “You were there, were you not?”

“Yes,” said Harry. Then, feeling it was pointless to pretend that he hadn’t overheard what they had been saying, he added, “I don’t think Madame Maxime is a good enough actress to have pretended she didn’t know where Crouch was, if she knew. She seemed really upset that he’d got away after attacking Berlioz.”

Dumbledore smiled at Harry behind Fudge’s back, his eyes twinkling.

“Yes, well,” said Fudge, looking embarrassed, “we’re about to go for a short walk on the grounds, Harry, if you’ll excuse us….”

“I just want to make sure that no one gets in trouble they don’t deserve,” Harry said, forcing an ingratiating smile. “I know the Ministry would never want to rush to judgment and risk convicting someone who’s innocent….”

Fudge’s face mottled, and Harry worried that he might have over-done it, but Fudge just took a deep breath and said, “Well—as you say, we’ve got work to do, Harry. Perhaps you ought to go back to your class—”

“I wanted to talk to you, Professor,” Harry said quickly, looking at Dumbledore, who gave him a swift, searching look.

“Wait here for me, Harry,” he said. “Our examination of the grounds will not take long.”

They trooped out in silence past him and closed the door. After a minute or so, Harry heard the clunks of Moody’s wooden leg growing fainter in the corridor below. He looked around.

“Hello, Fawkes,” he said.

Fawkes, Professor Dumbledore’s phoenix, was standing on his golden perch beside the door. The size of a swan, with magnificent scarlet-and-gold plumage, he swished his long tail and blinked benignly at Harry.

Harry sat down in a chair in front of Dumbledore’s desk. For several minutes, he sat and watched the old headmasters and headmistresses snoozing in their frames, thinking about what he had just heard, and running his fingers over his scar. It had stopped hurting now.

He felt much calmer, somehow, now that he was in Dumbledore’s office, knowing he would shortly be telling him about the dream. It didn’t hurt that he also knew there was no chance of Lilian finding Professor Moody and telling him the story Harry had made up, not if he was on his way out of the castle with Dumbledore—and even if she did, Moody would surely be able to figure out why Harry had lied to her, having just seen him. Harry had been willing to get into trouble to get to Dumbledore, but not getting in any was much better.

Harry looked up at the walls behind the desk. The patched and ragged Sorting Hat was standing on a shelf. A glass case next to it held what looked like a scaled model of the solar system, like the one Professor Trelawney sometimes used in their lessons, but this one had far too many planets and none of them seemed to be in the right place. The small orbs were gently revolving around the large silver sphere in the center, which was covered in markings that Harry couldn’t read; he wondered if they were the sort of thing that Draco was learning in his Ancient Runes classes.

He was staring curiously at the strange device when he noticed a patch of silvery light, dancing and shimmering on the glass case. He looked around for the source of the light and saw a sliver of silver-white shining brightly from within a black cabinet behind him, whose door had not been closed properly. Harry hesitated, glanced at Fawkes, then got up, walked across the office, and pulled open the cabinet door.

A shallow stone basin lay there, with rough carvings around the edge: more runes and symbols that Harry did not recognize. The silvery light was coming from the basin’s contents, which were like nothing Harry had ever seen before. He could not tell whether the substance was liquid or gas. It was a bright, whitish silver, and it was moving ceaselessly; the surface of it became ruffled like water beneath wind, and then, like clouds, separated and swirled smoothly. It looked like light made liquid—or like wind made solid—Harry couldn’t make up his mind.

He wanted to touch it, to find out what it felt like, but nearly four years’ experience of the magical world told him that sticking his hand into a bowl full of some unknown substance was a very stupid thing to do. Even Crabbe and Goyle knew better than that. He therefore pulled his wand out of the inside of his robes, cast a nervous look around the office, looked back at the contents of the basin, and prodded them.

The surface of the silvery stuff inside the basin began to swirl very fast.

Harry bent closer, his head right inside the cabinet. The silvery substance had become transparent; it looked like glass. He looked down into it, expecting to see the stone bottom of the basin—and saw instead an enormous room below the surface of the mysterious substance, a room into which he seemed to be looking through a circular window in the ceiling.

The room was dimly lit; he thought it might even be underground, for there were no windows, merely torches in brackets such as the ones that illuminated the walls of Hogwarts. Lowering his face so that his nose was a mere inch away from the glassy substance, Harry saw that rows and rows of witches and wizards were seated around every wall on what seemed to be benches rising in levels. An empty chair stood in the very center of the room. There was something about the chair that gave Harry an ominous feeling. Chains encircled the arms of it, as though its occupants were usually tied to it.

Where was this place? It surely wasn’t Hogwarts; he had never seen a room like that here in the castle. Moreover, the crowd in the mysterious room at the bottom of the basin was comprised of adults, and Harry knew there were not nearly that many teachers at Hogwarts. They seemed, he thought, to be waiting for something; even though he could only see the tops of their hats, all of their faces seemed to be pointing in one direction, and none of them were talking to one another.

The basin being circular, and the room he was observing square, Harry could not make out what was going on in the corners of it. He leaned even closer, tilting his head, trying to see…

The next thing he knew, the tip of his nose had touched the strange substance into which he was staring, and he was thrown forward into the memory—for memory he soon realized it must be. He watched in mute, unnoticed horror as two dementors brought none other than Igor Karkaroff into the room, where the chains on that foreboding chair wrapped around him of their own accord. He watched Crouch—a much younger, healthier looking Crouch than Harry had ever seen— callously officiating; watched Moody—a more intact Moody, still scarred, but with both of his own eyes and fewer marks across his face—glower and grumble; watched Dumbledore, looking much the same as ever, scorn the dementors and stand up for Snape.

That was the most shocking moment of the trial, for Harry: when Karkaroff named Professor Snape as a Death Eater.

Harry felt his skin go cold, even in the memory. Severus Snape, his Head of House, a Death Eater? It wasn’t possible, surely—

But Dumbledore rose to his feet.

“I have given evidence already on this matter,” he said calmly. “Severus Snape was indeed a Death Eater. However, he rejoined our side before Lord Voldemort’s downfall and turned spy for us, at great personal risk. He is now no more a Death Eater than I am.”

Harry breathed a sigh of relief even as the scene around him dissolved, transforming to a different day, a different trial. This was a much cheerier, more lighthearted affair; clearly no one but Crouch really believed that Ludo Bagman had done anything wrong, but Harry was left unsettled. He knew all too well that the Ministry was far from unbiased; had Bagman gotten away with serving Voldemort just because he was a famous Quidditch player? He had seemed genuine in his excuses, but Harry couldn’t help wondering…

Then the third trial started, the worst of them all. Harry felt sick, looking at Crouch’s pleading son and his whimpering wife. Each time the boy screamed, it cut through Harry like a knife; he couldn’t understand how Crouch could sit there and watch his own son begging for mercy and not react. He barely noticed the other three figures who had been brought in with the younger Crouch until they rose to accept their sentence and the woman with the heavy-lidded eyes looked up at Crouch and called, “The Dark Lord will rise again, Crouch! Throw us into Azkaban; we will wait! He will rise again and will come for us, he will reward us beyond any of his other supporters! We alone were faithful! We alone tried to find him!”

There was something familiar about the woman’s pale face—she was beautiful despite her strong jaw and thin lips, with her shining black hair and flashing dark eyes, but there was something about her (her pointed nose, perhaps, or the slant of her brows) that made Harry think he had seen her before….

His attention was distracted by the sight of Crouch’s son trying to fight off the dementors. The crowd was jeering, some of them on their feet, as the woman swept out of the dungeon, and the boy continued to struggle.

“I’m your son!” he screamed up at Crouch. “I’m your son!”

“You are no son of mine!” bellowed Mr. Crouch, his eyes bulging suddenly. “I have no son!”

The wispy witch beside him gave a great gasp and slumped in her seat. She had fainted. Crouch appeared not to have noticed.

“Take them away!” Crouch roared at the dementors, spit flying from his mouth. “Take them away, and may they rot there!”

“Father! Father, I wasn’t involved! No! No! Father, please!”

“I think, Harry, it is time to return to my office,” said a quiet voice in Harry’s ear.

Harry started. He looked around. Then he looked on his other side.

There was an Albus Dumbledore sitting on his right, watching Crouch’s son being dragged away by the dementors—and there was an Albus Dumbledore on his left, looking right at him.

“Come,” said the Dumbledore on his left, and he put his hand under Harry’s elbow. Harry felt himself rising into the air; the dungeon dissolved around him; for a moment, all was blackness, and then he felt as though he had done a slow-motion somersault, suddenly landing flat on his feet, in what seemed like the dazzling light of Dumbledore’s sunlit office. The stone basin was shimmering in the cabinet in front of him, and Albus Dumbledore was standing beside him.

“Professor,” Harry gasped, “I know I shouldn’t’ve—I didn’t mean—the cabinet door was sort of open and—”

“Of course,” said Dumbledore. “That was entirely my mistake, Harry.” He lifted the basin, carried it over to his desk, placed it upon the polished top, and sat down in the chair behind it. He motioned for Harry to sit down opposite him.

Harry did so, staring at the stone basin. The contents had returned to their original, silvery-white state, swirling and rippling beneath his gaze.

“What is it?” Harry asked shakily.

“This? It is called a Pensieve,” said Dumbledore. “I sometimes find, and I am sure you know the feeling, that I simply have too many thoughts and memories crammed into my mind.”

“Er,” said Harry, who couldn’t truthfully say that he had ever felt anything of the sort.

“At these times,” said Dumbledore, indicating the stone basin, “I use the Pensieve. One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one’s mind, pours them into the basin, and examines them at one’s leisure. It becomes easier to spot patterns and links, you understand, when they are in this form.”

“You mean…that stuff’s your _thoughts?”_ Harry said, staring at the swirling white substance in the basin.

“Certainly,” said Dumbledore. “Let me show you.”

Dumbledore drew his wand out of the inside of his robes and placed the tip into his own silvery hair, near his temple. When he took the wand away, hair seemed to be clinging to it—but then Harry saw that it was in fact a glistening strand of the same strange silvery-white substance that filled the Pensieve. Dumbledore added this fresh thought to the basin, and Harry, astonished, saw his own face swimming around the surface of the bowl. Dumbledore placed his long hands on either side of the Pensieve and swirled it, rather as a gold prospector would pan for fragments of gold…and Harry saw his own face change smoothly into Professor Snape’s, who opened his mouth and spoke to the ceiling, his voice echoing slightly.

“It’s coming back…Karkaroff’s too…stronger and clearer than ever…”

“A connection I could have made without assistance,” Dumbledore sighed, “but never mind.” He peered over the top of his half-moon spectacles at Harry, who was gaping at Snape’s face, which was continuing to swirl around the bowl. Something like suspicion flashed coldly in Dumbledore’s sharp blue eyes and he raised his brows at Harry. “I was using the Pensieve when Mr. Fudge arrived for our meeting and put it away rather hastily,” he said in a slow, expectant voice. “Undoubtedly I did not fasten the cabinet door properly. Naturally, it would have attracted your attention.”

“I’m sorry,” Harry mumbled.

Dumbledore shook his head. “Curiosity is not a sin,” he said, voice lightening. “But we should exercise caution with our curiosity…yes, indeed…”

Frowning slightly, he prodded the thoughts within the basin with the tip of his wand. Instantly, a figure rose out of it, a plump, scowling girl of about sixteen, who began to revolve slowly, with her feet still in the basin. She took no notice whatsoever of Harry or Professor Dumbledore. When she spoke, her voice echoed as Snape’s had done, as though it were coming from the depths of the stone basin. “He put a hex on me, Professor Dumbledore, and I was only teasing him, sir, I only said I’d seen him kissing Florence behind the greenhouses last Thursday….”

“But why, Bertha,” said Dumbledore sadly, looking up at the now silently revolving girl, “why did you have to follow him in the first place?”

“Bertha?” Harry whispered, looking up at her. “Is that—was that Bertha Jorkins?”

“Yes,” said Dumbledore, prodding the thoughts in the basin again; Bertha sank back into them, and they became silvery and opaque once more. “That was Bertha as I remember her at school.”

The silvery light from the Pensieve illuminated Dumbledore’s face, and it struck Harry suddenly how very old he was looking. He knew, of course, that Dumbledore was getting on in years, but somehow he never really thought of Dumbledore as an old man.

“So, Harry,” said Dumbledore quietly. “Before you got lost in my thoughts, you wanted to tell me something.”

“Yes,” said Harry. “Professor—I was in Herbology just now, and—well, we were cleaning Soporis Aphids off of the Honking Daffodils, and—er—I fell asleep.”

He hesitated here, wondering if a reprimand was coming, but Dumbledore merely said, “An unavoidable risk of such a task. Continue.”

“Well, I had a dream,” said Harry. “A dream about You-Know…er…Lord Voldemort. He was torturing Wormtail…you know who Wormtail—”

“I do know,” said Dumbledore promptly. “Please continue.”

Harry told him about the dream, about the snake, about his scar hurting so badly it woke him up.

Dumbledore merely looked at him.

“Er—that’s all,” said Harry.

“I see,” said Dumbledore quietly. “I see. Now, has your scar hurt at any other time this year, excepting the time it woke you up over the summer?”

“No, I—how did you know it woke me up over the summer?” said Harry, astonished.

“You are not Sirius’s only correspondent,” said Dumbledore. “I have also been in contact with him ever since he left Hogwarts last year. It was I who suggested the mountainside cave as the safest place for him to stay.”

Dumbledore got up and began walking up and down behind his desk. Every now and then, he placed his wand-tip to his temple, removed another shining silver thought, and added it to the Pensieve. The thoughts inside began to swirl so fast that Harry couldn’t make out anything clearly: It was merely a blur of color.

“Professor?” he said quietly, after a couple of minutes.

Dumbledore stopped pacing and looked at Harry.

“My apologies,” he said quietly. He sat back down at his desk.

“D’you—d’you know why my scar’s hurting me?”

Dumbledore looked very intently at Harry for a moment, and then said, “I have a theory, no more than that…. It is my belief that your scar hurts both when Lord Voldemort is near you, and when he is feeling a particularly strong surge of hatred.”

“But…why?”

“Because you and he are connected by the curse that failed,” said Dumbledore. “That is no ordinary scar.”

“So you think…that dream…did it really happen?”

“It is possible,” said Dumbledore. “I would say—probable. Harry—did you see Voldemort?”

“No,” said Harry. “Just the back of his chair. But—there wouldn’t have been anything to see, would there? I mean, he hasn’t got a body, has he? But…but then how could he have held the wand?” Harry said slowly.

“How indeed?” muttered Dumbledore. “How indeed…”

Neither Dumbledore nor Harry spoke for a while. Dumbledore was gazing across the room, and, every now and then, placing his wand-tip to his temple and adding another shining silver thought to the seething mass within the Pensieve.

“Professor,” Harry said at last, “do you think he’s getting stronger?”

“Voldemort?” said Dumbledore, looking at Harry over the Pensieve. It was the characteristic, piercing look Dumbledore had given him on other occasions, and always made Harry feel as though Dumbledore were seeing right through him in a way that even Moody’s magical eye could not. “Once again, Harry, I can only give you my suspicions.”

Dumbledore sighed again, and he looked older, and wearier, than ever.

“The years of Voldemort’s ascent to power,” he said, “were marked with disappearances. Bertha Jorkins has vanished without a trace in the place where Voldemort was known to be last. Mr. Crouch too has disappeared…within these very grounds. And there was a third disappearance, one which the Ministry, I regret to say, do not consider of any importance, for it concerns a Muggle. His name was Frank Bryce, he lived in the village where Voldemort’s father grew up, and he has not been seen since last August. You see, I read the Muggle newspapers, unlike most of my Ministry friends.”

Dumbledore looked very seriously at Harry.

“These disappearances seem to me to be linked. The Ministry disagrees—as you may have heard, while waiting outside my office.”

Harry nodded. Silence fell between them again, Dumbledore extracting thoughts every now and then. Harry felt as though he ought to go, but his curiosity held him in his chair.

“Professor?” he said again.

“Yes, Harry?” said Dumbledore.

“Er…could I ask you about…that court thing I was in…in the Pensieve?”

“You could,” said Dumbledore heavily. “I attended it many times, but some trials come back to me more clearly than others…particularly now….”

“You know—you know the trial you found me in? The one with Crouch’s son? Well…the Longbottoms they were talking about, the ones who were tortured. Were they relatives of Neville Longbottom? From Gryffindor?”

Dumbledore gave Harry an appraising look. “Has Neville ever told you why he has been brought up by his grandmother?” he said.

Harry shook his head, feeling a sudden but vague flash of guilt—as though he had promised to do something for someone, or meet someone somewhere, and then forgotten. He couldn’t think why.

“Yes, they were talking about Neville’s parents,” said Dumbledore. “His father, Frank, was an Auror just like Professor Moody. He and his wife were tortured for information about Voldemort’s whereabouts after he lost his powers, as you heard.”

“Is that how they died?” said Harry quietly.

“No,” said Dumbledore, his voice full of a bitterness that Harry had never heard there before. “They are not dead. They are insane. They are both in St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries. I believe Neville visits them, with his grandmother, during the holidays. They do not recognize him.”

Harry sat there, horror-struck. He had always thought that Longbottom’s parents were dead, although he wasn’t sure exactly where he had gotten that idea…something Neville had said some time, perhaps…

“The Longbottoms were very popular,” said Dumbledore. “The attacks on them came after Voldemort’s fall from power, just when everyone thought they were safe. Those attacks caused a wave of fury such as I have never known. The Ministry was under great pressure to catch those who had done it. Unfortunately, the Longbottoms’ evidence was—given their condition—none too reliable.”

“Then Mr. Crouch’s son might not have been involved?” said Harry slowly.

Dumbledore shook his head.

“As to that, I have no idea.”

“What about the people he was with?” Harry asked. “They seemed pretty guilty….”

Dumbledore nodded. “Oh yes,” he said, “Bellatrix was quite keen to take responsibility for her actions…. Unfortunately, few would have considered either her or the Lestrange brothers a reliable source for the truth either, so any testimony they might have given regarding the guilt or innocence of their companions—well.” He shook his head. “At any rate, no one thought to ask so there is no knowing what they might have said.”

“Bellatrix...” Harry frowned. “That name sounds familiar...”

“Lestrange is her married name,” Dumbledore told him calmly. “She was born Bellatrix Black.”

“Wha—she’s related to Sirius?”

“And your friend Mr. Malfoy,” said Dumbledore, nodding. “Bellatrix Lestrange is his mother’s oldest sister—and consequently, Sirius’s cousin.”

Harry realized why the woman in the Pensieve had looked so familiar: she looked like a younger, harsher, darker version of Draco’s mother, Narcissa Malfoy.

“So that must be the aunt of Draco’s who’d been in Azkaban with Sirius...”

“Undoubtedly,” said Dumbledore. “His mother’s only other sister has led a private, law-abiding life, and his father was an only child. If Draco was talking about relatives currently incarcerated in Azkaban, Bellatrix Lestrange is the most logical subject to assume.”

Harry sat in silence once more, watching the contents of the Pensieve swirl. There were two more questions he was burning to ask…but they concerned the guilt of living people….

“Er,” he said, “Mr. Bagman…”

“…has never been accused of any Dark activity since,” said Dumbledore calmly.

“Right,” said Harry hastily, staring at the contents of the Pensieve again, which were swirling more slowly now that Dumbledore had stopped adding thoughts. “And…er…”

But the Pensieve seemed to be asking his question for him. Professor Snape’s face was swimming on the surface again. Dumbledore glanced down into it, and then up at Harry.

“No more has Professor Snape,” he said.

Harry sighed in heartfelt relief. “That’s good,” he said. “Er—not that I thought you’d have hired him if he had been, I mean, but….”

“You had to ask,” said Dumbledore, in those same, measured tones. “I understand, Harry.”

“Don’t—don’t tell him I asked though, will you?” Harry asked desperately. “I don’t—I’d hate for him to get the wrong idea….”

Dumbledore smiled. “Your secrets are safe with me, Harry,” he said. “And now, I really do think that you had best return to class.” There was a finality in his tone that told Harry the interview was over. He stood up, and so did Dumbledore.

“Harry,” he said as Harry reached the door. “I understand the impulse to share secrets with one’s friends, but remember that not all of the secrets that you now know are yours to disperse at will. Please do not speak about Neville’s parents to anybody else. He has the right to let people know, when he is ready.”

“Yes, Professor,” said Harry, turning to go.

“And—”

Harry looked back. Dumbledore was standing over the Pensieve, his face lit from beneath by its silvery spots of light, looking older than ever. He stared at Harry for a moment, and then said, “Good luck with the third task.”

 


	28. The Third Task

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This section contains a few fragmented excerpts from Chapter Thirty-One, stretching from page 605 to page 635 of the American hardcover edition, before leading into some larger segments of excerpted text (with a few minor edits, of course) featuring the events of the third task itself. Several parts of the task have been abbreviated here for the sake of avoiding unnecessary repetition; please refer to the original source for a more detailed depiction of Harry’s progress through the maze.

“But…if the Dark Lord really is getting stronger…does that mean he’s coming _back?”_ Draco whispered.

Everything Harry had seen in the Pensieve, nearly everything Dumbledore had told and shown him afterward, he had now shared with Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle—and, of course, with Sirius, to whom Harry had sent an owl the moment he had left Dumbledore’s office. Harry and his friends sat up late in the common room once again that night, talking it all over until Harry’s mind was reeling, until he understood what Dumbledore had meant about a head becoming so full of thoughts that it would have been a relief to siphon them off.

Draco inched a little closer to the common room fire. He was facing away from the flames, staring out the windows into the blackness of the lake, his eyes wide in his pale face. He didn’t say what Voldemort’s return would mean for all of them; he didn’t need to. Harry figured that even Crabbe and Goyle didn’t need something that obvious explained to them.

“Dumbledore says this is the same as how it started last time,” said Harry. “With the disappearances.”

Draco’s eyes lifted from the murky waters to the scar on Harry’s forehead. “And the deaths,” he said softly.

Harry nodded.

“Yeah, but—he ain’t gonna kill _us_ ,” said Crabbe, smirking.

“Shut-up, Crabbe,” Draco said automatically.

Goyle, his thick brow furrowed in unaccustomed thought, said slowly, “I thought he was trapped in that book. The one the Weasley girl had. How’d he get out?”

Harry stared at him. “This…this is a different him,” he said at last. “That was…that was him when he was sixteen. A sort of…of a copy of himself, that he left behind.”

“Yeah,” said Draco, swallowing hard, “which is why he didn’t—the him we met in the Ch-chamber, I mean—why he didn’t know things that happened later, after he’d left school.”

“Oh,” said Goyle. He nodded obediently, but still looked confused.

Harry turned back to Draco. “At least we know why Moody and Crouch were so suspicious of Snape, anyway,” he said, wanting to change the subject away from the Chamber of Secrets before Draco worked himself into a fit of nerves over the memory.

“Oh—right,” Draco said, starting. “Of course.” He shook his head. “You would think Dumbledore might have done the decent thing and told Moody to lay-off Snape, when he hired him—but I guess that would require Dumbledore to do the decent thing, and we all know he’s rubbish at that.”

The other two laughed, but Harry didn’t. He was thinking about the way Crouch’s son had screamed when the dementors came for him, and about Sirius being locked-up in Azkaban for twelve years on Crouch’s say-so. “Now that Mr. Crouch is gone from the Ministry,” he said slowly, “do you think it might be easier for your dad to get one of his old convictions overturned? I mean…if he’s not there to protest it…?”

“You’re talking about Sirius, of course,” Draco said knowingly. “I don’t know. People tend to develop a bit of a martyr complex over someone once they’re gone, but on the other hand, it’s not like anyone knows Crouch is dead—”

“He’s dead?” said Crabbe, confused. “How? When?”

“My point exactly,” sneered Draco. “Even we don’t know what happened to him, and Harry was practically there at the time. So nobody will be worried about ‘preserving his legacy’ or ‘respecting the dead’ or any such rubbish—not yet, anyway. I’ll write to father and tell him that now will be a good time to push. He can play up the lost-his-mind angle, make people wonder if Crouch was ever reliable to being with….”

Harry nodded. “Good idea,” he said. He wondered if he ought to feel guilty about smearing Mr. Crouch’s name, but somehow he couldn’t muster the feeling. Maybe it was because he didn’t care about Mr. Crouch nearly as much as he did Sirius, or maybe it was the memory of the furious, bulging-eyed expression on Crouch’s face as he screamed, “I have no son!”

Harry shuddered. His parents might be dead, but at least he had never doubted they had loved him when they had been alive. They had, after all, died for him; he had heard the echo of those deaths just last year. He wondered what had felt worse to the younger Crouch: the clammy touch of the dementors, or hearing those cruel words from his own father.

No, Harry couldn’t bring himself to feel badly for Mr. Crouch.

“Let’s go to bed,” he suggested, glancing up at the clock on the mantle. “It’s late—I’m exhausted.”

The others didn’t argue. They trooped downstairs to their dormitory in silence, preoccupied with their thoughts. Even Crabbe and Goyle seemed subdued, forgoing their usual shoving-match to determine who got to walk through the door first. Harry climbed into bed and drew the curtains tight around him, as though they might act as a shield against his uncomfortable thoughts. He still lay awake long into the early hours of the morning, staring at nothing and thinking hard.

The next day, before Potions, Harry drew Hermione aside to give her an abbreviated account of what he had learned in Dumbledore’s office. She had been so horrified, and so intrigued, that she had insisted on sitting next to him in class so she could ask more questions, much to the annoyance of both Draco and Ron, who did not like giving up their usual Potions partner. They flat-out refused to work together, which left Draco sharing a table with Crabbe and Goyle while Ron partnered with the accident-prone Neville Longbottom.

While he waited for his cauldron to boil, Harry looked over at Longbottom, sweating and fidgeting over his own smoking potion. True to his word to Dumbledore, Harry had not told any of the others about Longbottom’s parents. As he carefully stirred his bubbling brew, he imagined how it must feel to have parents still living but unable to recognize you. He often got sympathy from strangers for being an orphan, but as he listened to Neville’s frantic attempts to bring his potion back under control, he thought that Longbottom deserved it more than he did. Sitting in the dungeon, Harry felt a rush of anger and hate toward the people who had tortured Mr. and Mrs. Longbottom…. He remembered the jeers of the crowd as Crouch’s son and his companions had been dragged from the court by the dementors…. He understood how they had felt…. Then he remembered the milk-white face of the screaming boy and realized with a jolt that he had died a year later….

It was Voldemort, Harry thought, staring unseeing at the blackboard while his potion curdled in front of him, it all came back to Voldemort…. He was the one who had torn these families apart, who had ruined all these lives….

 

Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle were supposed to be studying for their exams, which would finish on the day of the third task, but they were putting most of their efforts into helping Harry prepare.

Crabbe and Goyle, of course, were thrilled to have an excuse to ignore their schoolbooks—not that they would have been doing much studying anyway; Harry figured that by assisting him, they were actually learning more than they would have otherwise—but he was a little surprised that Draco wasn’t more worried about his grades.

“Nonsense,” said Draco blithely, “this is much more interesting…and it’s not like learning all of these hexes and jinxes won’t come in handy on some of the exams; Defense Against the Dark Arts, for one. Besides, I know pretty much everything we’ll need for our tests already…. Now, let’s try that fire-rope spell that father wrote us about again, I think I’ve almost got the hang of it—just needs a little more flick of the wrist, like that…yes…oops, sorry Crabbe! Might want to go see Madam Pomfrey for that one….”

The mood in the castle as they entered June became excited and tense again. Everyone was looking forward to the third task, which would take place a week before the end of term. Harry was practicing hexes at every available moment. He felt more confident about this task than either of the others. Difficult and dangerous though it would undoubtedly be, Moody was right: Harry had survived reckless and dangerous acts before, and this time he had some notice, some chance to prepare himself for what lay ahead. He also didn’t have to worry about anyone else depending on him for rescue; the pressure of trying to win a tournament was nothing compared to Ginny’s life, or Sirius’s freedom.

At Harry’s request—with Draco standing behind him, poking him in the side whenever he hesitated—Professor Snape had granted them permission to use one of the empty dungeon classrooms at lunchtimes and after dinner for their practicing. While Crabbe and Goyle balked at skipping meals, they were willing assistants other times and hardly complained when Harry jinxed them over and over again, working out the kinks in the spells. In addition to many of the interesting hexes that Mr. Malfoy had recommended, Harry had soon mastered the Impediment Curse, a spell to slow down and obstruct attackers; the Reductor Curse, which would enable him to blast solid objects out of his way; and the Four-Point Spell, a suggestion of Hermione’s that would make his wand point due north, therefore enabling him to check whether he was going in the right direction within the maze. He was still having trouble with the Shield Charm, though. This was supposed to cast a temporary, invisible wall around himself that deflected minor curses; Draco managed to shatter it with a well-placed Tarantallegra, and he, Crabbe, and Goyle laughed themselves silly while Harry pirouetted around the room for ten minutes afterward until it wore off.

“You’re not doing too badly otherwise, though,” Draco said, in a tone that would have been a lot more reassuring if he hadn’t still been smirking when he said it. “Here, let’s try the Fire Rope again….”

But Harry, who had no desire to attempt that treacherous spell again, or to be in the room while Draco was practicing it (Crabbe still had some of Madam Pomfrey’s orange paste on his ear from the last time), shook his head. “Nah,” he said, “I need some air, my head is spinning.”

They decided on a short break and went for a walk, before it got too dark for Harry to be outside without breaking his promise to Sirius. A group of second year girls ran past them, shrieking and giggling, and Harry caught sight of Cedric walking back up from the lake with Cho Chang. They exchanged awkward greetings—“Doing all right?” “Fine, thanks, you?” “Looking forward to the third task?” “Oh yeah, sounds a lark!”—and Harry led the way back inside.

“Come on,” he said, “back to work.”

The sight of Cedric and Cho together had filled him with a renewed determination to master every spell he could in the time remaining to him—even the tricky one with the fire lasso.

 

Sirius was sending daily owls now. Like Draco, he seemed to want to concentrate on getting Harry though the last task before they concerned themselves with anything else. He reminded Harry in every letter that whatever might be going on outside the walls of Hogwarts was not Harry’s responsibility, nor was it within his power to influence it.

 

> _If Voldemort really is getting stronger again,_ he wrote, _my priority is to ensure your safety. He cannot hope to lay hands on you while you are under Dumbledore’s protection, but all the same, take no risks: Concentrate on getting through that maze safely, and then we can turn our attention to other matters._

Harry’s nerves mounted as June the twenty-fourth drew closer, but they were not as bad as those he had felt before the first and second tasks. For one thing, he was confident that, this time, he had done everything in his power to prepare for the task. For another, this was the final hurdle, and however well or badly he did, the tournament would at last be over, which would be an enormous relief.

 

Breakfast was a very noisy affair at the Slytherin table on the morning of the third task. The post owls appeared, bringing Harry a good-luck card from Sirius. It was only a piece of parchment, folded over and bearing a muddy paw print on its front, but Harry appreciated it all the same. A tawny owl appeared for Theodore Nott a few minutes later, carrying his morning copy of the _Daily Prophet_. He unfolded the paper, glanced at the front page, and started laughing uncontrollably.

“What?” said Draco, craning his neck to see across the table, “What is it?”

“See for yourselves,” Theodore said, sniggering, and held the paper out toward Draco and Harry. They leaned in together to read it, and Harry found himself staring at his own picture, beneath the banner headline:

 

> **HARRY POTTER**  
>  “ **DISTURBED AND DANGEROUS”**
> 
> The boy who defeated He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named is unstable and possibly dangerous, _writes Rita Skeeter, Special Correspondent._ Alarming evidence has recently come to light about Harry Potter’s strange behavior, which casts doubts upon his suitability to compete in a demanding competition like the Triwizard Tournament, or even to attend Hogwarts school.
> 
> Potter, the _Daily Prophet_ can exclusively reveal, regularly collapses at school, and is often heard to complain of pain in the scar on his forehead (relic of the curse with which You-Know-Who attempted to kill him). On Monday last, midway through a Herbology lesson, your _Daily Prophet_ reporter witnessed Potter storming from the class, claiming that his scar was hurting too badly to continue studying.
> 
> It is possible, say top experts at St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries, that Potter’s brain was affected by the attack inflicted upon him by You-Know-Who, and that his insistence that the scar is still hurting is an expression of his deep-seated confusion.
> 
> “He might even be pretending,” said one specialist. “This could be a plea for attention.”
> 
> The _Daily Prophet_ , however, has unearthed worrying facts about Harry Potter that Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts, has carefully concealed from the Wizarding public.
> 
> Astoria Greengrass, a Hogwarts second year, revealed that Harry Potter speaks Parseltongue. “My sister told me that the year before I started school, there were a lot of people who thought he was the Heir of Slytherin—you know, when the Chamber of Secrets was opened? I think he went inside, him and his friends, near the end of all the attacks when that one girl was taken by the monster. They made a whole hallway cave in, I guess? I don’t know exactly, I wasn’t there, but it sounds like it was quite dangerous! And of course, he was one of Professor Lupin’s favorite students—the werewolf who taught Defense Against the Dark Arts here last year, do you remember that?”
> 
> Who among us can forget the revelation that Dumbledore had chosen to hire, and conceal the condition of, a man suffering from the effects of lycanthropy, to whom the pupils of Hogwarts School were regularly exposed without their parents’ consent or knowledge? Indeed, as the _Daily Prophet_ revealed last year, he even transformed in full sight of several of his students on at least one occasion, and rumor has it that he was once a good friend of notorious mass murderer Sirius Black, who coincidentally penetrated Hogwarts School several times during the course of Remus Lupin’s tenure there.
> 
> Harry Potter’s questionable choice in mentors is not restricted to werewolves alone; as loyal _Daily Prophet_ readers will remember, this reporter recently exclusively revealed that the Hogwarts Care of Magical Creatures teacher, Rubeus Hagrid, is in fact a half-giant, and by Potter’s own admission Hagrid’s classes are one of his favorite lessons—possibly because they are some of the few chances he has at Hogwarts to exercise his true interests without fear of censure.
> 
> Parseltongue, the ability to converse with snakes, has long been considered a Dark Art. Indeed, the most famous Parselmouth of our times is none other than You-Know-Who himself. A member of the Dark Force Defense League, who wished to remain unnamed, stated that he would regard any wizard who could speak Parseltongue “as worthy of investigation. Personally, I would be highly suspicious of anybody who could converse with snakes, as serpents are often used in the worst kinds of Dark Magic, and are historically associated with evildoers.” Similarly, “anyone who seeks out the company of such vicious creatures as werewolves and giants would appear to have a fondness for violence.”
> 
> Albus Dumbledore should surely consider whether a boy such as this should be allowed to compete in the Triwizard Tournament. Some fear that Potter might resort to the Dark Arts in his desperation to win the tournament, the third task of which takes place this evening.

“Gone off me a bit, hasn’t she?” said Harry lightly, folding up the paper.

Draco was shaking his head, looking horrified. “You can’t let her get away with this, Harry,” he said. “You have to—I don’t know—get the truth out there somehow, do a proper interview, find a legitimate reporter to tell your side of it….”

Harry shrugged. “Anyone who’s been bamboozled by Rita Skeeter already isn’t likely to believe anything I say to the contrary, and everybody who’s too smart to be fooled by her doesn’t need to hear me say it’s all rubbish to know she’s lying,” he said.

Draco still looked worried. “I don’t know, Harry, a person’s reputation is important…you could end up in serious trouble down the line, if you let ideas like this spread and fester unchecked….”

Harry laughed. “Well,” he said, “then I suppose I’ll just have to win the tournament, and then she’ll have to eat her words, won’t she?”

Draco shook his head again, his face drawn. He said, “This is serious, Harry, I mean it…. This could be really bad for you….”

Little Astoria Greengrass, trailed by two other second year Slytherins, tiptoed up to where Harry and his friends were sitting. Her eyes were huge in her small face. “I—I’m so sorry!” she squeaked, when Harry turned to look at her. “I didn’t mean—I didn’t know that Ms. Skeeter was going to—I mean, I just thought she wanted to hear stories about all the—the amazing things you’ve done, so I told her about you s-saving me from Sirius Black, and how good you are at Quidditch, and all those other things, but she—she twisted up everything I said, made it all sound horrible, and I didn’t know….”

Harry shook his head. “It’s not your fault,” he said. Astoria looked like she was on the brink of tears. He tried to give her an encouraging smile. “Honest, you didn’t do anything wrong. That’s just what Rita Skeeter does.”

“I’m really sorry!” Astoria wailed, then turned and ran from the Hall, her friends following.

Harry turned back around to face the others again, but before he could say anything, a breathless voice called out behind him, “Harry!”

He turned again to see Hermione Granger hurrying across the Great Hall from the Gryffindor table. She was trailed by Ron Weasley, who was carrying a copy of the _Daily Prophet_ and looking bemused.

“Oh Harry, I’ve just read the article, are you all right?” Hermione didn’t give Harry a chance to answer, though, but continued viciously, “That old _cow_. For her to write all of those—those horrible things, today of all days! Oh, if I could just find a _hint_ of how she’s doing it….” Hermione shook her head hard, making her bushy hair whip around her face like a mass of untidy brown snakes. “Did you see any sign of her outside the greenhouses? Any indication at all of how she might have overheard you?”

Harry shook his head. “I was a little preoccupied with watching You-Know-Who torture Pettigrew and talk about murdering me to be looking around for Rita Skeeter,” he said flatly.

Draco snorted. Hermione frowned at both of them.

“Aren’t you researching magical methods of bugging?” Harry asked her. “You tell me how she did it….”

“I’ve been trying!” said Hermione. “But I…but…”

An odd, dreamy expression suddenly came over Hermione’s face. She slowly raised a hand and ran her fingers through her hair.

“Are you all right?” said Ron, frowning at her.

“Yes,” she Hermione breathlessly. “Harry, quick—what did that Lovegood girl say? Something about a beetle eavesdropping, wasn’t it?”

“Er—” said Harry. “Maybe? I don’t know, she seemed really keen on some bug when we were out in the gardens at the Yule Ball….”

“You’re getting ideas from _Loony Lovegood_ now?” Draco crowed.

Hermione nodded vaguely. She ran her fingers through her hair again and then stared at her empty palm. Harry and Ron stared at each other. Draco sniggered quietly into his porridge.

“I’ve had an idea,” Hermione said, gazing into space. “I think I know…because then no one would be able to see…even Moody…and she’d have been able to get into the greenhouse…but she’s not allowed…she’s _definitely_ not allowed…I think we’ve got her! Just give me two seconds in the library—just to make sure!”

With that, Hermione seized the _Daily Prophet_ from Ron and dashed out of the Great Hall.

“Oi!” Ron called after her. “We’ve got our History of Magic exam in ten minutes! Blimey,” he said, turning back to Harry and Draco, “she must really hate that Skeeter woman to risk missing the start of an exam.” He shook his head. “Well—guess I’d better go get her school bag, it’ll be bad enough if she turns up late to the exam, but if she doesn’t even have her books with her….” Still shaking his head, Ron trudged back to the Gryffindor table.

Draco burst out laughing. “Granger’s gone totally barmy!” he exclaimed, but Harry wasn’t so sure. Hermione Granger was a lot of things, but stupid wasn’t one of them.

“Looks like we might not have to work so hard to outscore Granger this year, eh?” Draco said, leaning across the table to smirk at Theodore, who smiled back thinly. Harry didn’t think that now was a good time to point out that to date, neither of them had ever managed to outscore Hermione in much of anything.

“Guess we’d better get going to Charms,” Draco continued, gathering the notes he had been skimming while he ate. “Crabbe, Goyle! Finish up, it’s time to leave!” he ordered sharply, then turned to Harry. “What about you, just going to read up on more spells?”

Exempt from the end-of-term tests as a Triwizard champion, Harry had been sitting in the back of every exam class so far, looking up fresh hexes for the third task.

“S’pose so,” Harry said to Draco; but just then, Professor Snape came walking alongside the Slytherin table toward him.

“Potter, you may join the other champions in the chamber off the Great Hall after breakfast.”

“But the tasks’ not till tonight!” said Harry, accidentally spilling scrambled eggs down his front, afraid he had mistaken the time.

“Obviously,” said Snape witheringly, “but the champions’ families have been invited to witness the final task. It would be polite if you were to at least acknowledge your… _guest’s_ arrival.”

He swept away in a billow of black robes. Harry gaped after him.

“He doesn’t expect the Dursleys to turn up, does he?” he asked Draco blankly.

“I almost wish they would,” Draco said, chortling. “Can you imagine their _faces?”_ Still cackling, he chivvied Crabbe and Goyle from their seats and the three of them set off for Charms together.

Harry finished his breakfast in the emptying Great Hall. He saw Fleur Delacour get up from the Ravenclaw table and join Cedric as he crossed to the side chamber and entered. Krum slouched off to join them shortly afterward. Harry stayed where he was. He really didn’t want to go into the chamber. He had no family—no family who would turn up to see him risk his life, anyway. But just as he was getting up, thinking that he might as well go up to the library and do a spot more hex research, the door of the side chamber opened, and Cedric stuck his head out.

“Harry, hurry up—what are you waiting on?”

Utterly perplexed, Harry got up. The Dursleys couldn’t possibly be here, could they? He walked across the Hall and opened the door into the chamber.

Cedric and his parents were just inside the door. Viktor Krum was over in a corner, conversing with his dark-haired mother and father in rapid Bulgarian. He had inherited his father’s hooked nose. On the other side of the room, Fleur was jabbering away in French to her mother. Fleur’s little sister, Gabrielle, was holding her mother’s hand. She waved at Harry, who waved back, grinning. Then he saw someone he had never expected to see again, certainly not now: Remus Lupin, last year’s Defense Against the Dark Arts professor.

Harry stopped dead, staring.

“Professor Lupin?” he gasped.

Lupin smiled at him. A tired, sickly-looking man with flecks of gray in his light brown hair, Lupin looked every bit as worn as he had when Harry had seen him last, and a little shabbier. Harry couldn’t help wondering how far off the next full moon was.

“Hello Harry,” said Professor Lupin. “I hope you don’t mind me taking the liberty of coming. I know I’m not family, but as your god-father couldn’t be here himself, he asked if I would stand in. He didn’t want you to be all alone today.” Lupin did not add, “All alone and being forced to watch everyone else here, with their families, reminding you of what you don’t have,” but he might have. Instead he said, a bit nervously, “I would have owled you first to see if it was all right, but unfortunately Siri—er, Padfoot, he got in touch with me very last minute, and there wasn’t time to wait for your reply. Dumbledore was very gracious to allow me to come anyway,” Lupin looked anxiously around the room, “but I certainly understand if you’d rather I left…”

“No!” Harry said quickly. “No, I—I’m really glad you’re here. Thank you.”

“Thank Padfoot, Harry, it was his idea.”

Harry was torn between conflicting emotions: on the one hand, he was very glad not to be standing here alone. On the other, having Lupin there instead of his parents, or even his god-father, reminded Harry of just how alone he really was. If only Mr. Malfoy had been able to coax the Ministry into moving faster to exonerate Sirius, he might have been here with Harry today, instead of having to send Lupin in his stead….

Harry wasn’t sure what to say to Professor Lupin now. He looked around the room, wondering what the other champions and their families were making of the fact that Harry’s only visitor was one of his old teachers. Fleur Delacour, he noticed, was eyeing Lupin curiously, while Krum and his parents were studiously ignoring both him and Harry. Cedric caught Harry looking and grinned back. He excused himself to his parents and walked over. Harry could see the Diggorys watching nervously from where they stood on the other side of the room and he tensed up, wondering what awful thing Cedric was about to say to Lupin—but Cedric just held out his hand.

“Professor,” he said in a friendly voice, and Lupin shook the offered hand with a quietly relieved smile.

“Mr. Diggory,” he said. “Congratulations on your tournament performance. Everything I’ve heard has been very impressive, very impressive indeed. First place so far!”

“Thanks,” said Cedric, “but I’m not—that is, Harry and I are tied right now—”

“First place is still first place, no matter how many people are in it at a time,” said Lupin calmly.

Harry frowned; there was something about that idea that didn’t seem right, but he couldn’t put his finger on what it was….

Cedric nodded, though. “True enough,” he said, smiling. He glanced at Harry and then back at Lupin. “I won’t keep you,” he continued. “I just wanted to say, sir, that even though you weren’t here at Hogwarts very long, it was still a privilege to be your student, and I wish you could have stayed longer.”

“Thank you, Cedric,” said Lupin in a rather stuffy voice. “I would have liked that, too.”

Cedric turned to Harry. “Well, if I don’t get a chance to say it later, Harry, good luck.”

“Thanks,” said Harry, and then, surprised that it wasn’t harder to say the words, he added, “you too.”

Mr. and Mrs. Diggory came over to join their son. Harry turned around to greet them, but Amos Diggory spoke before he could say anything: “There you are, are you?” he said, looking Harry up and down. “Bet you’re not feeling quite as full of yourself now Cedric’s caught you up on points, are you?”

“What?” said Harry.

“Ignore him,” said Cedric in a low voice to Harry, frowning at his father. “He’s been angry ever since Rita Skeeter’s article about the Triwizard Tournament—you know, when she made out you were the only Hogwarts champion.”

“Didn’t bother to correct her, though, did he?” said Amos Diggory, looking at Harry through narrow eyes. Harry was reminded of the night of the Quidditch World Cup, when Mr. Diggory had tried very hard to find Harry or his friends guilty for conjuring the Dark Mark. “Still…you’ll show him, Ced. When it comes down to it, cheating can only get a person so far.”

“Dad!” said Cedric. He sounded annoyed.

“Well,” said Mr. Diggory in a huffy voice, “no one can deny that according to the rules, Potter here shouldn’t even be in the tournament.”

“No one is denying that,” said Professor Lupin, “least of all Harry. We are all of us quite anxious to find out who put Harry’s name in that goblet, and why.”

Mr. Diggory gave Professor Lupin, in his shabby robes, a scrutinizing look. “And you are…?” he asked.

“Remus Lupin, Mr. Diggory,” Lupin said, holding out his hand. “I’m sorry, I don’t think we’ve been introduced, but I had the pleasure of teaching your son last year….”

“Ah yes,” said Mr. Diggory, his eyes narrowing further, “the werewolf. Yes, Ced’s told us both a lot about you.” Mr. Diggory’s jaw worked, as though he was thinking of saying more, but he stayed quiet and shook Professor Lupin’s hand, although he let go again very quickly.

“Yes,” said Cedric, in a loud voice, “I said he was probably the best Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher we ever had, and I can’t imagine how I would have got through my O.W.L.s without him.”

Mr. Diggory looked a little flustered. “Right, right,” he said. “Well—and how are you related to Potter here, Mr. Lupin?”

Lupin shook his head. “I’m not,” he said, “but I’m a friend of the family, and as no one else could be here with Harry today, I was asked to step-in.”

Mr. Diggory now looked even more awkward. His wife stepped forward and, although she made no move to offer Professor Lupin her hand, she was smiling warmly. “That’s a lovely thing for you to do, Mr. Lupin.”

“Oh, well,” said Lupin, suddenly looking almost as uncomfortable as Mr. Diggory. “Least I could do, really,” he mumbled.

“Hmm,” said Mr. Diggory skeptically, but his wife laid a hand on his arm and he held his tongue.

For a moment they stood there in strained silence, the two Hogwarts’ champions, the parents, and the former professor. Then Lupin said, “Well, Harry—fancy a walk outside? It’s far too nice a day to stay cooped-up in the castle all morning, not if one doesn’t have tests one has to deal with….”

Harry smiled. “Yeah, all right,” he said. He and Lupin politely excused themselves and walked away from the Diggorys and back through the Great Hall, which was deserted now.

“Have you talked to Sirius lately?” Harry asked.

Lupin frowned and looked nervously around the empty Hall. “Let’s call him Padfoot, shall we, Harry? Just to be safe.”

“All right,” Harry said agreeably. “Padfoot, then. Have you talked to him? How is he?”

“I’m afraid we’ve corresponded very little since his move north,” Lupin said. “Until the letter I got from him yesterday asking me to come here today, I hadn’t heard from him for weeks. I expect you’re much more up-to-date about his current condition—and whereabouts—than I am.”

“Oh,” said Harry, feeling disappointed.

Lupin must have sensed that, because he said gently, “I think that Siri—Padfoot, I think he’s trying to protect me by keeping his distance. Too many people at the Ministry know that we used to be friends, and given my proximity to his near-capture last year—and his escape—I’m under a certain amount of suspicion. Indeed, I think that were it not for the fact that I was incapacitated by virtue of being transformed at the time of Sirius’s escape, I would probably be sitting in a cell right now, presumed guilty through association.”

“They couldn’t really do that,” Harry exclaimed.

Lupin shook his head grimly. “I’m afraid that there are very few limits to what the Ministry could not do to someone like me, if they declared it a matter of the public good.” He forced himself to smile. “But there,” he said, “this is no time for such maudlin thoughts, Harry. Tell me how your classes have been this year?”

So Harry did so, taking especial care to describe his lessons with Mad-Eye Moody, which Lupin seemed to find fascinating. Harry even told him about how Moody had transfigured one of his friends into a ferret for a punishment, although he prudently didn’t say who. “I knew Moody years ago,” Lupin told him, grinning, “and it doesn’t sound like he’s changed one bit.”

Harry had a very enjoyable morning walking over the sunny grounds with Professor Lupin, showing him the Beauxbatons carriage and the Durmstrang ship. Lupin was particularly fascinated with the ship. “You say it came up _from_ the lake?” he said, squinting at the skeletal ship with its furled sails and polished brightwork. “Interesting. I wouldn’t mind a closer look at the spells they used on that….”

“The Durmstrang students usually sit with us at meals,” Harry offered. “I’ll see if anyone will take us aboard, if you want.”

Lupin looked tempted, but he shook his head. “Probably not a good idea, Harry,” he said. “Not as long as Igor Karkaroff is their headmaster, anyway.”

Harry wondered if Lupin knew that Karkaroff had been a Death Eater. From the grim look in his eyes, Harry thought he had to at least suspect—or maybe Karkaroff just didn’t like werewolves.

They returned to the castle for lunch. Many of Harry’s housemates were still skittish about Professor Lupin’s condition, and a few actually changed seats to move away from him when he joined Harry at the Slytherin table, but Harry’s friends came to sit by him—all of them carefully choosing seats on the opposite side of the table from Harry and Lupin, who pretended not to notice the way they jockeyed to put the wide swatch of golden plates, platters, and goblets in between them like a barrier to keep the werewolf at bay. Viktor Krum walked over to the table with his parents in tow, and since there was so much space around Harry and Lupin, they took seats next to them, to Daphne, Pansy, and Draco’s evident delight.

Krum grunted his way through terse introductions and Harry leaned forward to shake hands with his parents. Mr. Krum eyed him curiously, eyes flickering to Harry’s hairline and the lightning bolt scar that his fringe as ever failed to hide, but Mrs. Krum looked deeply suspicious. “You are—four—champion?” she said, in heavily-accented English. “Excess Hogwarts boy?”

“Er—yeah,” said Harry, feeling uncomfortable. “It wasn’t—it wasn’t on purpose, though. I don’t know who put my name in, but it wasn’t me, and it wasn’t Professor Dumbledore either.”

“Hmm,” said Mrs. Krum, and turned to say something in very rapid Bulgarian to her husband, which Harry could not understand at all, save for noticing that she said “Karkaroff” a number of times.

Mr. Krum shook his head and said nothing, but Viktor replied to his mother in a very short, sharp sentence, and turned his attention to his meal. She continued to frown at Harry, but said nothing more.

“Viktor says you do Seeking fly as well?” Mr. Krum said.

Harry nodded. “Yeah—I mean, just at Hogwarts on one of the school teams, not professionally or anything.”

“Is good thing,” said Mr. Krum, “Quidditch. Viktor is most goodly at.”

Harry nodded enthusiastically. “I know,” he said, “we saw him at the World Cup.”

As though he had been waiting for just this opening, Draco leaned across the table and said, “Your son is probably the best flier I’ve ever seen in my life, sir. It was a real pleasure getting to watch him play, and flying with him here has been a true honor.”

Both of Krum’s parents brightened-up at this, and gave Draco genuine smiles.

Harry, grinning quietly, let himself relax and enjoy the meal. He knew that now that Draco had started gushing, it wouldn’t be long before Krum’s parents were eating out of his hand and ready to swear that they had never had a more pleasant lunch in their lives, language barriers notwithstanding.

He caught Professor Lupin looking at him out of the corner of his eye, amusement on his prematurely-lined face, and coughed to hide a laugh. Lupin winked at him, and they all settled in to enjoy a fascinating conversation about Quidditch which lasted them well past the end of the lunch period. When Draco, Daphne, Pansy, Crabbe, and Goyle were forced to leave to go to their next class, everyone groaned.

Harry and Professor Lupin whiled away the afternoon with a long walk around the castle, and then returned to the Great Hall for the evening feast. Ludo Bagman and Cornelius Fudge had joined the staff table now. Bagman looked quite cheerful, but Cornelius Fudge, who was sitting next to Madame Maxime, looked stern and was not talking. Harry supposed that he had come to take Mr. Crouch’s place as the fifth judge in lieu of Percy Weasley. Madame Maxime was concentrating on her plate, and Harry thought her eyes looked red. Hagrid kept glancing along the table at her.

There were more courses than usual, but Harry, who was starting to feel really nervous now, didn’t eat much. As the enchanted ceiling overhead began to fade from blue to a dusky purple, Dumbledore rose to his feet at the staff table, and silence fell.

“Ladies and gentlemen, in five minutes’ time, I will be asking you to make your way down to the Quidditch field for the third and final task of the Triwizard Tournament. Will the champions please follow Mr. Bagman down to the stadium now.”

Harry got up. The Slytherins all along the table were applauding him; his friends and Professor Lupin all wished him good luck, and he headed off out of the Great Hall with Cedric, Fleur, and Viktor.

“Feeling all right, Harry?” Bagman asked as they went down the stone steps onto the grounds. “Confident?”

“I’m okay,” said Harry. It was sort of true; he was nervous, but he kept running over all the hexes and spells he had been practicing in his mind as they walked, and the knowledge that he could remember them all made him feel better.

They walked onto the Quidditch field, which was now completely unrecognizable. A twenty-foot-high hedge ran all the way around the edge of it. There was a gap right in front of them: the entrance to the vast maze. The passage beyond it looked dark and creepy.

Five minutes later, the stands had begun to fill; the air was full of excited voices and the rumbling of feet as the hundreds of students filed into their seats. The sky was a deep, clear blue now, and the first stars were starting to appear. Harry looked around anxiously for the moon, but couldn’t see it yet. He told himself that there was no reason to worry; Lupin surely kept careful track of the moon’s cycle, and wouldn’t have agreed to come tonight if there was any danger that he might transform in front of the students again. Hagrid, Professor Moody, Professor McGonagall, and Professor Flitwick came walking into the stadium and approached Bagman and the champions. They were wearing large, red, luminous stars on their hats, all except Hagrid, who had his on the back of his moleskin vest.

“We are going to be patrolling the outside of the maze,” said Professor McGonagall to the champions. “If you get into difficulty, and wish to be rescued, send red sparks into the air, and one of us will come and get you, do you understand?”

The champions nodded.

“Off you go, then!” said Bagman brightly to the four patrollers.

“Good luck, Harry,” Hagrid whispered, and the four of them walked away in different directions, to station themselves around the maze. Bagman now pointed his wand at his throat, muttered, _“Sonorous,”_ and his magically magnified voice echoes into the stands.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the third and final task of the Triwizard Tournament is about to begin! Let me remind you how the points currently stand! Tied in first place, with eighty-five points each—Mr. Cedric Diggory and Mr. Harry Potter, both of Hogwarts School!” The cheers and applause sent birds from the Forbidden Forest fluttering into the darkening sky. “In second place, with eighty points—Mr. Viktor Krum, of Durmstrang Institute!” More applause. “And in third place—Miss Fleur Delacour, of Beauxbatons Academy!”

Harry could just make out Professor Lupin, Draco, Daphne, Morag, Crabbe, and Goyle applauding Fleur politely, near the front rows of the stands. Pansy, looking sulky, had her arms folded and wasn’t even pretending to cheer. Harry waved up at his friends, and they waved back, beaming at him.

“So…on my whistle, Harry and Cedric!” said Bagman. “Three—two—one—”

He gave a short blast on his whistle, and Harry and Cedric hurried forward into the maze.

The towering hedges cast black shadows across the path, and, whether because they were so tall and thick or because they had been enchanted, the sound of the surrounding crowd was silenced the moment they entered the maze. Harry felt almost as though he were underwater again. He pulled out his wand, muttered, _“Lumos,”_ and heard Cedric do the same just behind him.

After about fifty yards, they reached a fork. They looked at each other.

“See you,” Harry said, and he took the left one, while Cedric took the right.

Harry heard Bagman’s whistle for the second time. Krum had entered the maze. Harry sped up. His chosen path seemed completely deserted. He turned right, and hurried on, holding his wand high over his head, trying to see as far ahead as possible. Still, there was nothing in sight.

Bagman’s whistle blew in the distance for the third time. All of the champions were now inside.

Harry kept looking behind him. The old feeling that he was being watched was upon him. The maze was growing darker with every passing minute as the sky overhead deepened to navy. Harry finally spotted the moon—a thin sliver of a crescent—and relaxed slightly; that was one weight off his mind, at least. Now all he had to worry about was the task itself. He reached a second fork.

“ _Point Me,”_ he whispered to his wand, holding it flat in his palm.

The wand spun around once and pointed toward his right, into solid hedge. That way was north, and he knew that he needed to go northwest for the center of the maze. The best he could do was to take the left fork and go right again as soon as possible.

The path ahead was empty too, and when Harry reached a right turn and took it, he again found the way unblocked. Harry didn’t know why, but the lack of obstacles was unnerving him. Surely he should have met something by now? It felt as though the maze was luring him into a false sense of security. Then he heard movement right behind him. He held out his wand, ready to attack, but its beam fell only upon Cedric, who had just hurried out of a path on the right-hand side. Cedric looked severely shaken. The sleeve of his robe was smoking.

“Hagrid’s Blast-Ended Skrewts!” he hissed. “They’re enormous—I only just got away!”

He shook his head and dived out of sight, along another path. Keen to put plenty of distance between himself and the skrewts, Harry hurried off again. Then, as he turned a corner, he saw…a dementor gliding toward him. Twelve feel tall, its face hidden by its hood, its rotting, scabbed hands outstretched, it advanced, sensing its way blindly toward him. Harry could hear its rattling breath; he felt clammy coldness stealing over him, but knew what to do….

He summoned the happiest thought he could, concentrated with all his might on the thought of getting out of the maze and celebrating with Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle, raised his wand, and cried, _“Expecto Patronum!”_

Harry wasn’t sure if it was because Professor Lupin’s presence had brought back memories of learning to cast the spell last year, or if it was because he had spent so much time practicing other defensive spells over the last several weeks, but the Patronus Charm had never come more easily.

A silver stag erupted from the end of Harry’s wand and galloped toward the dementor. Harry stared, wide-eyed, at his first proper look at his full Patronus. He had conjured one at the end of last year, when he had been distracting the dementors around Hogwarts long enough for Sirius to get away, but he had been too distracted himself at the time to really look. Now he drank in the sight, so transfixed by the silver stag that he barely noticed the dementor trip over the hem of its robes…. Harry had never seen a dementor stumble.

“Hang on!” he shouted, advancing in the wake of his silver Patronus. “You’re a boggart! _Riddikulus!”_

There was a loud crack, and the shape-shifter exploded in a wisp of smoke. The silver stag faded from sight. Harry wished it could have stayed, he could have used some company…but he moved on, quickly and quietly as possible, listening hard, his wand held high once more.

Harry found his way impeded by little else. Once, he had to struggle his way through a strange golden mist that turned the whole world upside down when Harry stepped through it, and once he had been forced to fight his way past one of Hagrid’s skrewts—Cedric had been right, they were enormous—but mostly what he had to contend with were empty dead ends. He wondered what had caused Fleur Delacour to scream like that, but at the same time, he couldn’t help thinking, _One champion down…_

He had been hurrying along his new path for a few minutes, when he heard something in the path running parallel to his own that made him stop dead.

“What are you doing?” yelled Cedric’s voice. “What the hell d’you think you’re doing?”

And then Harry heard Krum’s voice.

“ _Crucio!”_

The air was suddenly full of Cedric’s yells. Horrified, Harry began sprinting up his path, trying to find a way into Cedric’s. When none appeared, he tried the Reductor Curse again. It wasn’t very effective, but it burned a small hole in the hedge through which Harry forced his leg, kicking at the thick brambles and branches until they broke and made an opening; he struggled through it, tearing his robes, and looking to his right, saw Cedric jerking and twitching on the ground, Krum standing over him.

Harry pulled himself up and pointed his wand at Krum just as Krum looked up. Krum turned and began to run.

“ _Stupefy!”_ Harry yelled.

The spell hit Krum in the back; he stopped dead in his tracks, fell forward, and lay motionless, facedown in the grass. Harry dashed over to Cedric, who had stopped twitching and was lying there panting, his hands over his face.

“Are you all right?” Harry said roughly, grabbing Cedric’s arm.

“Yeah,” panted Cedric. “Yeah…I don’t believe it…he crept up behind me…. I heard him, I turned around, and he had his wand on me….”

Cedric got up. He was still shaking. He and Harry looked down at Krum.

“I can’t believe this…I thought he was all right,” Harry said, staring at Krum.

“So did I,” said Cedric.

“Did you hear Fleur scream earlier?” said Harry.

“Yeah,” said Cedric. “You don’t think Krum got her too?”

“I don’t know,” said Harry slowly.

“Should we leave him here?” Cedric muttered.

“No,” said Harry. “I reckon we should send up red sparks. Someone’ll come and collect him…otherwise he’ll probably be eaten by a skrewt.”

“He’d deserve it,” Cedric muttered, but all the same, he raised his wand and shot a shower of red sparks into the air, which hovered high above Krum, marking the spot where he lay.

Harry and Cedric stood there in the darkness for a moment, looking around them. Then Cedric said, “Well…I s’pose we’d better go on….”

“What?” said Harry. “Oh…yeah…right…”

It was an odd moment. He and Cedric had been briefly united against Krum—now the fact that they were opponents came back to Harry. The two of them proceeded up the dark path without speaking, then Harry turned left, and Cedric right. Cedric’s footsteps soon died away.

Harry moved on, continuing to use the Four-Point Spell, making sure he was moving in the right direction. It was between him and Cedric now. His desire to reach the cup first was now burning stronger than ever, but he could hardly believe what he’d just seen Krum do. The use of an Unforgivable Curse on a fellow human being meant a life term in Azkaban, that was what Moody had told them. Sure, Harry had thought longingly of using the Imperius Curse on Filch before, but only to get him out of the way, not to hurt him—and he hadn’t really been _serious_ about it, just desperate…. Krum surely couldn’t have wanted the Triwizard Cup that badly…. Harry sped up.

Every so often he hit more dead ends, but the increasing darkness made him feel sure he was getting near the heart of the maze. He didn’t meet any other creatures except for a sphinx, whose riddle he actually managed to solve on his own, making Harry feel inordinately proud of himself; usually he relied on Draco whenever the subject of clever wordplay arose, but he had figured out the answer _—a spider_ —to the sphinx’s riddle all one his own….

He had to be close now, he had to be…. His wand was telling him he was bang on course; as long as he didn’t meet anything too horrible, he might have a chance….

Harry broke into a run. He had a choice of paths up ahead. _“Point Me!”_ he whispered again to his wand, and it spun around and pointed him to the right-hand one. He dashed up this one and saw light ahead.

The Triwizard Cup was gleaming on a plinth a hundred yards away. Suddenly a dark figure hurtled out onto the path in front of him.

Cedric was going to get there first. Cedric was sprinting as fast as he could toward the cup, and Harry knew he would never catch up, Cedric was much taller, had much longer legs—

Then Harry saw something immense over a hedge to his left, moving quickly along a path that intersected with his own; it was moving so fast Cedric was about to run into it, and Cedric, his eyes on the cup, had not seen it—

“Cedric!” Harry bellowed. “On your left!”

Cedric looked around just in time to hurl himself past the thing and avoid colliding with it, but in his haste, he tripped. Harry saw Cedric’s wand fly out of his hand as a gigantic spider stepped onto the path and began to bear down upon Cedric.

“ _Stupefy!”_ Harry yelled; the spell hit the spider’s gigantic, hairy black body, but for all the good it did, he might as well have thrown a stone at it; the spider jerked, scuttled around, and ran at Harry instead. Harry flung Mr. Malfoy’s rope of fire at the spider, hoping to trip it, but he missed. He tried again and caught one of the spider’s legs. The spider let out an unearthly shriek that made Harry instinctively clap his hands over his ears; the rope of fire vanished. The leg that Harry had lassoed was smoldering but the spider had seven other legs and hurtled toward Harry as fast as before. He raised his wand again:

“ _Stupefy! Impedimenta! Stupefy!”_

But it was no use—the spider was either so large, or so magical, that the spells were doing no more than aggravating it. Harry had one horrifying glimpse of eight shining black eyes and razor-sharp pincers before it was upon him.

He was lifted into the air in its front legs; struggling madly, he tried to kick it; his leg connected with the pincers and next moment he was in excruciating pain. He could hear Cedric yelling _“Stupefy!”_ too, but his spell had no more effect than Harry’s—Harry raised his wand as the spider opened its pincers once more and shouted _“Expelliarmus!”_

It worked—the Disarming Spell made the spider drop him, but that meant that Harry fell twelve feet onto his already injured leg, which crumpled beneath him. Without pausing to think, he aimed high at the spider’s underbelly, as he had done with the skrewt, and shouted _“Stupefy!”_ just as Cedric yelled the same thing.

The two spells combined did what one alone had not: The spider keeled over sideways, flattening a nearby hedge, and strewing the path with a tangle of hairy legs.

“Harry!” he heard Cedric shouting. “You all right? Did it fall on you?”

“No,” Harry called back, panting. He looked down at his leg. It was bleeding freely. He could see some sort of thick, gluey secretion from the spider’s pincers on his torn robes. He tried to get up, but his leg was shaking badly and did not want to support his weight. He leaned against the hedge, gasping for breath, and looked around.

Cedric was standing feet from the Triwizard Cup, which was gleaming behind him.

“Take it, then,” Harry panted to Cedric. “Go on, take it. You’re there.”

But Cedric didn’t move. He merely stood there, looking at Harry. Then he turned to stare at the cup. Harry saw the longing expression on his face in its golden light. Cedric looked around at Harry again, who was now holding onto the hedge to support himself. Cedric took a deep breath.

“You take it. You should win. That’s twice you’ve saved my neck in here.”

“That’s not how it’s supposed to work,” Harry said. He felt angry; his leg was very painful, he was aching all over from trying to throw off the spider, and after all his efforts, Cedric had beaten him to it, just as he’d beaten Harry to ask Cho to the ball. “The one who reaches the cup first gets the points. That’s you. I’m telling you, I’m not going to win any races on this leg.”

Cedric took a few paces nearer to the Stunned spider, away from the cup, shaking his head.

“No,” he said.

“Stop being noble,” said Harry irritably. “Just take it, then we can get out of here.”

Cedric watched Harry steadying himself, holding tight to the hedge.

“You told me about the dragons,” Cedric said. “I would’ve gone down in the first task if you hadn’t told me what was coming.”

“I had help on that too,” Harry snapped, trying to mop up his bloody leg with his robes. “You helped me with the egg—we’re square.”

“I had help on the egg in the first place,” said Cedric.

“We’re still square,” said Harry, testing his leg gingerly; it shook violently as he put weight on it; he had sprained his ankle when the spider had dropped him.

“You should’ve got more points on the second task,” said Cedric mulishly. “You stayed behind to get all the hostages. I should’ve done that.”

“I was the only one who was thick enough to take that song seriously!” said Harry bitterly. “Just take the cup!”

“No,” said Cedric.

He stepped over the spider’s tangled legs to join Harry, who stared at him. Cedric was serious. He was walking away from the sort of glory Hufflepuff House hadn’t had in centuries.

“Go on,” Cedric said. He looked as though this was costing him every ounce of resolution he had, but his face was set, his arms were folded, he seemed decided.

Harry looked from Cedric to the cup. He was sure this had to be a trick—but the shadowy, stubborn look on Cedric’s face was too pained to be faked. He took a step forward. His leg buckled and he had to cling to the hedge to stay upright. Cedric didn’t move. Harry took another step, and then another, lurching a bit, more hopping than walking—but he moved forward by inches, and Cedric did nothing to stop him; did nothing to reach over and grab the cup before Harry could get to it.

Cedric turned away, clearly not wanting to watch Harry limp toward the plinth where the cup stood. Harry didn’t think it was because the sight of his wounds made the other boy feel nauseated.

When he reached it, Harry paused, one hand braced on the stone plinth to hold himself upright, the other held out over one of the cup’s gleaming handles.

“Are you—are you sure about this?” Harry asked.

“Just take it,” Cedric said. His voice was hollow, and it shook violently on the second word.

Harry swallowed hard and nodded. “Right, then,” he said. “You’re—you’re an incredible person, you know that, Cedric?”

He grasped the handle.

Instantly, Harry felt a jerk somewhere behind his navel. His feet had left the ground. He could not unclench the hand holding the Triwizard Cup; it was pulling him onward in a howl of wind and swirling color, Cedric left stubbornly behind.

 


	29. Flesh, Blood, and Bone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This section comprises slightly-amended excerpts of Chapter Thirty-Two, running from pages 636 to 643 in the American hardcover edition, a good portion of which has been truncated as being unnecessary to repeat at length here (although I advise you to refer to the original source for the full experience of Voldemort’s resurrection). This is, as such, an exceptionally short section, so I have chosen to post it and the next two similarly abbreviated parts concurrently. This section is the start of **today’s three-part update** , so please begin reading here!

Harry felt his feet slam into the ground; his injured leg gave way, and he fell forward; his hand let go of the Triwizard Cup at last. He raised his head.

“Hello?” he said.

No one answered. Gritting his teeth, Harry dragged himself to his feet and looked around.

He had left the Hogwarts grounds completely; he had obviously traveled miles—perhaps hundreds of miles—for even the mountains surrounding the castle were gone. He was standing instead in a dark and overgrown graveyard; the black outline of a small church was visible beyond a large yew tree to his right. A hill rose above him to his left. Harry could just make out the outline of a fine old house on the hillside.

“A Portkey,” Harry said aloud, more to break the oppressive silence of the place than because he thought anyone might answer him. “The Cup must have been a Portkey….”

He looked around the graveyard. It was completely silent and slightly eerie.

“Hello?” he said again. “Is this—is this part of the task? Is anyone there?”

Deciding that it was better to be safe than sorry, Harry pulled out his wand. He kept looking around him. He had, yet again, the strange feeling that he was being watched.

Suddenly a noise—Harry braced himself against a gravestone, easing some of his weight off of his injured leg, and said again, “Hello?” He was sure there was someone coming, but they didn’t answer him.

Squinting tensely through the darkness, he watched the figure drawing nearer, walking steadily toward him between the graves. Harry couldn’t make out a face, but from the way it was walking and holding its arms, he could tell that it was carrying something. Whoever it was, he was short, and wearing a hooded cloak pulled up over his head to obscure his face. And—several paces nearer, the gap between them closing all the time—Harry saw the thing in the person’s arms looked like a baby…or was it merely a bundle of robes?

Harry lowered his wand slightly and silently watched the approaching figure.

It stopped beside a towering marble headstone, only six feet from Harry. For a second, the two of them simply looked at one another.

And then, without warning, Harry’s scar exploded with pain. It was agony such as he had never felt in all his life; his wand slipped from his fingers as he put his hands over his face; his knees buckled; he was on the ground and he could see nothing at all; his head was about to split open.

From far away, above his head, he heard a high, cold voice say, _“Get the boy.”_

Quiet footsteps crunched across the grass toward him; Harry couldn’t have run even if he had been thinking clearly enough to try. The pain in his scar reached such a pitch that he retched, and then it diminished. Forcing himself to open his stinging, streaming eyes, Harry looked up just in time to find himself being pulled to his feet.

The short man in the cloak had put down his bundle, lit his wand, and was dragging Harry toward the marble headstone. Harry saw the name upon it flickering in the wandlight before he was forced around and slammed against it.

**TOM RIDDLE**

The cloaked man was now conjuring tight cords around Harry, tying him from neck to ankles to the headstone. Harry could hear shallow, fast breathing from the depths of the hood; he struggled, and the man hit him—hit him with a hand that had a finger missing. And Harry realized who was under the hood.

“You!” he gasped. “I know who you are! You’re the one who betrayed my parents! You’re Peter Pettigrew—Wormtail! Look at me, you coward! Look at me!”

But Wormtail, who had finished conjuring the ropes, did not reply; he was busy checking the tightness of the cords, his fingers trembling uncontrollably, fumbling over the knots. Once sure that Harry was bound so tightly to the headstone that he couldn’t move an inch, Wormtail drew a length of some black material from the inside of his cloak and stuffed it roughly into Harry’s mouth; then, without a word, he turned from Harry and hurried away. Harry couldn’t make a sound, nor could he see where Wormtail had gone; he couldn’t turn his head to see beyond the headstone; he could only see what was right in front of him.

A little more than twenty feet away, glinting in the starlight, lay the Triwizard Cup. Harry’s wand was on the ground not far away from it. The bundle of robes that Harry had thought was a baby was close by, at the foot of the grave. It seemed to be stirring fretfully. Harry watched it, and his scar seared with pain again…and he suddenly knew that he didn’t want to see what was in those robes…he didn’t want that bundle opened….

Harry watched, helpless, gagged, as the giant snake slithered in and out of the darkness. He watched, helpless, as Wormtail dragged a heavy cauldron into view, its crackling flames doing little to light the barren expanse of the little graveyard. He watched, helpless, as Wormtail opened the robes and revealed the—the _thing_ inside them. It had the shape of a crouched human child, except that Harry had never seen anything less like a child. It was hairless and scaly-looking, a dark, raw, reddish black. Its arms and legs were thin and feeble, and its face—no child alive ever had a face like that—flat and snakelike, with gleaming red eyes.

Harry watched, helpless, as Wormtail lowered it into the cauldron, summoned the bones from the grave— _“Bone of the father, unknowingly given, you will renew your son!”_ —watched, helpless, as Wormtail raised the dagger to his own wrist— _“Flesh—of the servant—w-willingly given—you will—revive—your master”_ —and closed his eyes just in time to avoid the sight, but not the accompanying scream—watched, helpless, as Wormtail, trembling and bleeding, took his own blood— _“B-blood of the enemy…forcibly taken…you will…resurrect your foe”_ —and then collapsed beside the cauldron, cradling the bleeding stump of his arm, gasping and sobbing.

He watched, helpless, as a surge of white steam billowed thickly from the cauldron and then, through the mist in front of him, he saw, with an icy surge of terror, the dark outline of a man, tall and skeletally thin, rising slowly from inside the cauldron.

“Robe me,” said the high, cold voice from behind the steam, and Wormtail, sobbing and moaning, still cradling his mutilated arm, scrambled to pick up the black robes from the ground, got to his feet, reached up, and pulled them one-handed over his master’s head.

The thin man stepped out of the cauldron, staring at Harry…and Harry stared back into the face that had haunted his nightmares for three years. Whiter than a skull, with wide, livid scarlet eyes and a nose that was flat as a snake’s with slits for nostrils…

Lord Voldemort had risen again.

 


	30. The Death Eaters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This section, like the last, consists largely of one single excerpt from the original book—Chapter Thirty-Three, stretching from page 644 to page 658 in the American hardcover edition—with numerous small amendments, including several truncated sections which have been summarized rather than repeated word-for-word. Please refer to the original text if you wish to have the full details of the abbreviated portions restored. This is the **second part** of today's three-part update, so please make sure that you start with the previous chapter before reading this one!

Voldemort looked away from Harry and began examining his own body. His hands were like large, pale spiders; his long white fingers caressed his own chest, his arms, his face; the red eyes, whose pupils were slit, like a cat’s, gleamed still more brightly through the darkness. He held up his hands and flexed the fingers, his expression rapt and exultant. He took not the slightest notice of Wormtail, who lay twitching and bleeding on the ground, nor of the great snake, which had slithered back into sight and was circling Harry again, hissing. Voldemort slipped one of those unnaturally long-fingered hands into a deep pocket and drew out a wand. He caressed it gently too; and then he raised it, and pointed it at Wormtail, who was lifted off the ground and thrown against the headstone where Harry was tied; he fell to the foot of it and lay there, crumpled up and crying. Voldemort turned his scarlet eyes upon Harry, laughing a high, cold, mirthless laugh.

Wormtail’s robes were shining with blood now; he had wrapped the stump of his arm in them.

“My Lord…” he choked, “my Lord…you promised…you did promise…”

“Hold out your arm,” said Voldemort lazily.

“Oh Master…thank you, Mater…”

He extended the bleeding stump, but Voldemort laughed again.

“The other arm, Wormtail.”

“Master, please… _please_ …”

Voldemort bent down and pulled out Wormtail’s left arm; he forced the sleeve of Wormtail’s robes up past his elbow, and Harry saw something on the skin there, something like a vivid red tattoo—a skull with a snake protruding from its mouth—the image that had appeared in the sky at the Quidditch World Cup: the Dark Mark. Voldemort examined it carefully, ignoring Wormtail’s uncontrollable weeping.

“It is back,” he said softly, “they will all have noticed it…and now, we shall see…now we shall know…”

He pressed his long white forefinger to the brand on Wormtail’s arm.

The scar on Harry’s forehead seared with a sharp pain again, and Wormtail let out a fresh howl; Voldemort removed his fingers from Wormtail’s mark, and Harry saw that it had turned jet black.

A look of cruel satisfaction on his face, Voldemort straightened up, threw back his head, and stared around at the dark graveyard.

“How many will be brave enough to return when they feel it?” he whispered, his gleaming red eyes fixed upon the stars. “And how many will be foolish enough to stay away?”

He began to pace, and as he paced, he began to talk—to Harry, although Harry did not reply, could not reply, with the gag still in place; paced and talked about his dead Muggle father and his dead witch mother, who had left him to be raised in a Muggle orphanage, but he broke-off the storytelling suddenly, saying, “But look, Harry! My _true_ family returns….”

The air was suddenly full of the swishing of cloaks. Between graves, behind the yew tree, in every shadowy space, wizards were Apparating. All of them were hooded and masked. And one by one they moved forward…slowly, cautiously, as though they could hardly believe their eyes. One of them turned toward the headstone where Harry was bound and gasped, then looked away quickly; the others had eyes only for their Dark Lord. Voldemort stood in silence, waiting for them. Then one of the Death Eaters fell to his knees, crawled toward Voldemort, and kissed the hem of his black robes.

“Master…Master…” he murmured.

The Death Eaters behind him did the same; each of them approaching Voldemort on his knees and kissing his robes, before backing away and standing up, forming a silent circle, which enclosed Tom Riddle’s grave, Harry, Voldemort, and the sobbing and twitching heap that was Wormtail. Yet they left gaps in the circle, as though waiting for more people. Voldemort, however, did not seem to expect more. He looked around at the hooded faces, and though there was no wind, a rustling seemed to run around the circle, as though it had shivered.

“Welcome, Death Eaters,” said Voldemort quietly. “Thirteen years…thirteen years since last we met. Yet you answer my call as though it were yesterday…. We are still united under the Dark Mark, then! _Or are we?”_

He put back his terrible face and sniffed, his slit-like nostrils widening.

“I smell guilt,” he said. “There is a stench of guilt upon the air.”

A second shiver ran around the circle, as though each member of it longed, but did not dare, to step back from him.

“I see you all, whole and healthy, with your powers intact—such prompt appearances!—and I ask myself…why did this band of wizards never come to the aid of their master, to whom they swore eternal loyalty?”

No one spoke. No one moved, not even Harry, still bound to the headstone, as Voldemort chided his old followers for their lack of initiative, their lack of dedication, their lack of belief in him and his powers. None of them spoke even when Voldemort raised his wand to torture one of their own after he attempted to beg for forgiveness. Avery screamed, and Harry hoped desperately that the sound would carry, that someone would come—but no one did.

Voldemort rewarded Wormtail with a gleaming silver hand, but Harry had the impression that he did it more to impress his other followers than out of any real gratitude to Wormtail for his sacrifice.

“May your loyalty never waver again, Wormtail,” said Voldemort.

“No, my lord…never, my lord…”

Wormtail stood up and took his place in the circle, staring at his powerful new hand, his face still shining with tears. Voldemort now approached the man on Wormtail’s right.

“Lucius, my slippery friend,” he whispered, halting before him. “I am told that you have not renounced the old ways, though to the world you present a respectable face. You are still ready to take the lead in a spot of Muggle-torture, I believe? Yet you never tried to find me, Lucius…. Your exploits at the Quidditch World Cup were fun, I daresay…but might not your energies have been better directed toward finding and aiding your master?”

“My Lord, I was constantly on the alert,” came a voice that Harry knew well from beneath the hood. “Had there been any sign from you, any whisper of your whereabouts—”

Harry would have shouted, if not for the gag in his mouth; as it was, his muffled and wordless cry still split the night, interrupting Mr. Malfoy’s hasty excuses. At once every eye in the circle fixed on him—every eye except for those of Mr. Malfoy, who stared fixedly in front of him, refusing to look at Harry.

“Ah, so you _do_ know the boy, Lucius?” Voldemort asked, his cold voice gleeful. He snapped his fingers and Mr. Malfoy’s mask disappeared, revealing the familiar and unmistakable face of Harry’s best friend’s father. He looked shaken and extraordinarily pale, even for him.

“I do,” said Mr. Malfoy, his voice hoarse. “I sent my son to seek him out when the boy returned to the Wizarding World,” he said, speaking quite rapidly, as though afraid he might not have time to get all the words out. “I instructed him to befriend the Potter boy, in case he might be useful. At first, I admit that I had hoped that he would prove to be a worthy successor of sorts, a point that we could rally around and continue your great cause. Like so many others, I had assumed that the only way he could possibly have defeated _your_ powers, my lord”—here he gave a little bow—“was if he possessed some special Dark Magic of his own. Regrettably, he proved to be useless as anything more than a token to demonstrate to the Ministry the… _sincerity of my reformation_.” Mr. Malfoy's voice grew smoother as he spoke, and when he smirked, he looked much like his usual self once more.

“How fortuitous,” Voldemort purred, “that I will soon require insights into the life and mind of Harry Potter…you and your son could be of great use in assisting me with the next phase of my plan, filling in the gaps that my loyal servant who has been making notes on the boy this past year might be unaware of…yes, you and dear—what is his name, your son?”

Mr. Malfoy swallowed hard before he answered, curtly: “Draco. His name is Draco.”

“Dear Draco,” Voldemort said, his lipless mouth curling in a smile. “Yes…his help may prove invaluable to me soon...if you think he will be up to the task...?”

“It—it would—be a great honor for him, my lord, to assist you in any way,” Mr. Malfoy said, the polish of his unctuous tones faltering. “Narcissa and I would be...would be so proud...”

“As you should be.... Yes, the two of you together may be enough to redeem your failures, Lucius, when I make my triumphant return to the world….”

 

Voldemort laughed, high and cold, then stopped abruptly. “But what of your son, Lucius?” he asked. “You do not have any reason to fear that he might have actually grown _fond_ of the Potter boy, I hope?”

“Draco did his duty,” Mr. Malfoy retorted in a voice even colder than Voldemort’s laugh; clearly he had no interest in discussing his son any further with the Dark Lord.

“Of course, of course,” Voldemort said, and smiled. He was not so easily dissuaded from the topic. “But after so long playing a role, is it not all too easy—especially for the young—to forget what is pretense, and what is truth? It is so hard for people, sometimes, controlling their messy feelings....”

“Draco has done his duty,” Mr. Malfoy repeated icily, “and will continue to do so, of that you need have no doubts.”

“And what of you, my friend?” Voldemort asked, his voice sharpening. “Might you not have some conflicted feelings of your own?”

“I assure you, my lord,” Mr. Malfoy said, “my loyalty is and has always been only with you.”

Voldemort chuckled. “You are loyal to your own skin,” he sneered, “but as its preservation rests with me, I think that I can continue to trust you as I always have.” He patted Mr. Malfoy on the cheek, still chuckling, and moved along the circle.

As soon as Voldemort passed by him, Mr. Malfoy’s gray eyes slid—almost involuntarily, it seemed—sideways to Harry. His pale, pointed face was alight with horror.

Feeling a stir of desperate hope, Harry met Mr. Malfoy’s eyes with his own, pleading, silently begging him to help him, to save him….

Mr. Malfoy turned away, his face a harder, harsher mask than the silver skulls that the rest of the Death Eaters still wore. Harry’s heart sank, cold and heavy in his chest.

Voldemort had stopped, and was staring at the space—large enough for two people—that separated Malfoy and the next man.

“The Lestranges should stand here,” Voldemort said quietly. “But they are entombed in Azkaban. They were faithful. They went to Azkaban rather than renounce me…. When Azkaban is broken open, the Lestranges will be honored beyond their dreams. The dementors will join us…they are our natural allies…we will recall the banished giants…I shall have all my devoted servants returned to me, and an army of creatures whom all fear….”

He walked on. Some of the Death Eaters he passed in silence, but he paused before others and spoke to them. Harry was startled to recognize more names: Crabbe, Goyle, even Nott. Surely— _surely_ —they could not be the parents of his friends? Was everyone he knew related to the Death Eaters, somehow?

Harry’s brain was whirring with misery and confusion, so that he hardly heard Voldemort when he talked about those who had died and those who had fled and those who were still faithful. He wrenched his attention back to the present when he saw the Death Eaters stirring, their eyes darting sideways at one another through their masks.

“He is at Hogwarts, that faithful servant, and it was through his efforts that our young friend arrived here tonight….

“Yes,” said Voldemort, a grin curling his lipless mouth as the eyes of the circle flashed once again in Harry’s direction. “One might go so far as to call Harry Potter my guest of honor tonight.”

There was a silence. Then the Death Eater closest to the wide gap that marked where the dead and missing should have stood stepped forward and Mr. Nott’s thin voice spoke from under his mask.

“My lord, won’t you tell us—we are all so desperate to know—won’t you share with us the story behind this…this monumental triumph? We are all so…so keen to understand how you have managed to return, after all these years….”

“Ah, what a story it is, Josiah,” said Voldemort. “And it begins—and ends—with my young friend here.”

He walked lazily over to stand next to Harry, so that the eyes of the whole circle—save for Mr. Malfoy, who continued to look fixedly away from Harry—were upon the two of them. The snake continued to circle.

“You know, of course, that they have called this boy my downfall?” Voldemort said softly, his red eyes upon Harry, whose scar began to burn so fiercely that he almost screamed in agony. “You all know that on the night I lost my powers and my body, I tried to kill him. His mother died in the attempt to save him—and unwittingly provided him with a protection I admit I would never have foreseen, which my most loyal servant alerted me to when he learned the story of this boy’s foray into my own once-precious Chamber of Secrets: I would not be able to touch the boy.

“His mother left upon him the traces of her sacrifice…. This is old magic, a type that I would not have anticipated without this timely warning—but also an opportunity that I quickly saw how best to take advantage of. And see—I can indeed touch him now.”

Harry felt the cold tip of the long white finger touch him, and thought his head would burst with the pain. Voldemort laughed softly in his ear, then took the finger away and continued addressing the Death Eaters.

“I miscalculated all those years ago, my friends, I admit it. My curse was deflected by the woman’s foolish sacrifice, and it rebounded upon myself. Aaah…pain beyond pain, my friends; nothing could have prepared me for it. I was ripped from my body, I was less than spirit, less than the meanest ghost…but still, I was alive. What I was, even I do not know…I, who have gone further than anybody along the path the leads to immortality. You know my goal—to conquer death. And now, I was tested, and it appeared that one or more of my experiments had worked…for I had not been killed, though the curse should have done it. Nevertheless, I was as powerless as the weakest creature alive, and without the means to help myself…for I had no body, and every spell that might have helped me required the use of a wand….

“I remember only forcing myself, sleeplessly, endlessly, second by second, to exist…. I settled in a faraway place, in a forest, and I waited…. Surely, one of my faithful Death Eaters would try and find me…one of them would come and perform the magic I could not, to restore me to a body…but I waited in vain….”

The shiver ran once more around the circle of listening Death Eaters. Voldemort let the silence spiral horribly before continuing.

He told them of how he had still been able to possess the bodies of others, animals mainly, until hapless Professor Quirrell had stumbled upon him—how his plan to steal the Philosopher’s Stone from Hogwarts had been thwarted by the teachers there, including one whom he had hoped might still have been loyal to him….

Silence once more; nothing was stirring, not even the leaves on the yew tree. The Death Eaters were quite motionless, the glittering eyes in their masks fixed upon Voldemort, and upon Harry.

Then, worst yet, he talked about Wormtail—how he had fled from his old friends and had followed the gossip of rodents to Voldemort’s hiding place. A sharp, fierce hatred burned within Harry as he stared at the man who had betrayed his parents—hatred mixed heavily with self loathing. It had been his fault that Wormtail had escaped, his inattention that had allowed Wormtail to get away from Hogwarts alive, and thus to restore Voldemort to life…. If Harry had acted faster, had killed the rat the moment he knew what it was, none of this would be happening now…. He promised himself that if he ever had such a chance again, he would not hesitate….

So consumed with his thoughts of thwarted revenge was he, that Harry barely heard Voldemort tell his followers how he had extracted the information about the Triwizard Tournament from Bertha Jorkins, how he had killed her and used Wormtail to enact the means of his resurrection, how Dumbledore had invoked ancient magic to protect Harry, how Voldemort had used the Triwizard Tournament as a smokescreen to bring Harry here tonight….

Voldemort moved slowly forward and turned to face Harry. He raised his wand.

“ _Crucio!”_

It was pain beyond anything Harry had ever experienced; his very bones were on fire; his head was surely splitting along his scar; his eyes were rolling madly in his head; he wanted it to end…to black out…to die…

And then it was gone. He was hanging limply in the ropes binding him to the headstone of Voldemort’s father, looking up into those bright red eyes though a kind of mist. The night was ringing with the sound of the Death Eaters’ laughter.

“You see, I think, how foolish it was to suppose that this boy could ever have been stronger than me,” said Voldemort. “But I want there to be no mistake in anybody’s mind. Harry Potter escaped me by a lucky chance. And I am now going to prove my power by killing him, here and now, in front of you all, when there is no Dumbledore to help him, and no mother to die for him. I will give him his chance. He will be allowed to fight, and you will be left in no doubt which of us is the stronger. Just a little longer, Nagini,” he whispered, and the snake glided away through the grass to where the Death Eaters stood watching.

“Now untie him, Wormtail, and give him back his wand.”

 


	31. Priori Incantatem

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This section is little more than a summarized excerpt of Chapter Thirty-Four, reaching from page 659 to page 669 of the American hardcover edition, although it contains several minor alterations and glosses over the bulk of both Voldemort and Harry’s duel and the effects of the Priori Incantatem spell itself, as the only definitive change there would have been the removal of Cedric’s shade and his body from the description of events—a subtraction which I am sure you can all make without me spelling it out! If you wish to refresh your memory of the details of the duel and the echoes of the spells that Voldemort’s wand cast previously, please refer to the original source.
> 
>  **IMPORTANT NOTE:** due to the brevity of this and the previous two chapters—the bulk of their events having been summarized rather than directly quoted—all three of them have been posted concurrently. If you are starting here from the latest update, please jump backwards to “Flesh, Blood, and Bone” first to read them in order!

Wormtail approached Harry, who scrambled to find his feet, to support his own weight before the ropes were untied. Wormtail raised his new silver hand, pulled out the wad of material gagging Harry, and then, with one swipe, cut through the bonds tying Harry to the gravestone.

There was a split second, perhaps, when Harry might have considered running for it, but his injured leg shook under him as he stood on the overgrown grave, as the Death Eaters closed ranks—Mr. Malfoy included, although he still refused to look directly at Harry—forming a tighter circle around him and Voldemort, so that the gaps where the missing Death Eaters should have stood were filled. Wormtail walked out of the circle to the place where the Triwizard Cup lay and returned with Harry’s wand, which he thrust roughly into Harry’s hand without looking at him. Then Wormtail resumed his place in the circle of watching Death Eaters.

“You have been taught how to duel, Harry Potter?” said Voldemort softly, his red eyes glinting through the darkness.

At these words Harry remembered, as though from a former life, the dueling club at Hogwarts he had attended briefly two years ago…. He had learned very little there, except that speaking to snakes in front of other people was a bad idea…but he didn’t fool himself pretending that the snake here would obey anyone other than Voldemort; the Basilisk had not listened to anyone but Tom Riddle, either….

He tried to run through the list of hexes that Mr. Malfoy had sent him in preparation for the third task, but the thought of the man whom Harry had once believed to be a friend was too painful; his brain skittered away from the spells he had offered…. He thought about his arguments with Draco over which spells he ought to be practicing, his own naïve insistence that the Disarming Spell would be of more use than a Flame Rope or a Knock-Back Jinx…true, it had saved him from the spider, but what use would it be to deprive Voldemort of his wand, even if he could, when he was surrounded by Death Eaters, outnumbered by at least thirty to one? He had never learned anything that could possibly fit him for this. He knew he was facing the thing against which Moody had always warned…the unblockable _Avada Kedavra_ curse—and Voldemort was right—his mother was not here to die for him this time…. He was quite unprotected….

“We bow to each other, Harry,” said Voldemort, bending a little, but keeping his snakelike face upturned to Harry. “Come, the niceties must be observed…. Dumbledore would like you to show manners…. Bow to death, Harry….”

The Death Eaters were laughing again. Mr. Malfoy’s desperate chuckle stood out against the others. Voldemort’s lipless mouth was smiling. Harry did not bow. There was no sense in playing along this time; stalling Voldemort as he and Draco had once stalled Tom Riddle would do him no good. Even if Cedric had made it out of the maze to tell them that Harry had vanished, Cedric couldn't tell anyone where the Cup had taken him. No one was coming to save him; there was no hope of escape. But he was not going to let Voldemort play with him before killing him…he was not going to give him that satisfaction….

“I said, _bow,”_ said Voldemort, raising his wand—and Harry felt his spine curve as though a huge, invisible hand were bending him ruthlessly forward, and the Death Eaters laughed harder than ever.

“Very good,” said Voldemort softly, and as he raised his wand the pressure bearing down upon Harry lifted too. “And now you face me, like a man…straight-backed and proud, the way your father died….

“And now—we duel.”

But it wasn’t a duel, what happened next; it was too one-sided a contest for that, a callous predator playing with its food. One by one Voldemort subjected Harry to the Unforgivable Curses—first the pain, then the control, then the final curse, the Killing Curse….

Only Harry, once again, did not die. Their wands linked, the ghosts of Voldemort’s spells being forced out of his wand one by one…his parents, he saw his parents again, for the first time since Dumbledore had taken the Mirror of Erised away from him…and they saved him again, saved him for the second time, even though they were already dead….

And Harry ran as he had never run in his life…no longer aware of the pain in his leg, his whole being concentrated on what he had to do—

“ _Accio!”_ Harry yelled, pointing his wand at the Triwizard Cup.

It flew into the air and soared toward him. Harry caught it by the handle—

He heard Voldemort’s scream of fury at the same moment that he felt the jerk behind his naval that meant the Portkey had worked—it was speeding him away in a whirl of wind and color…. He was going back.

 


	32. Veritaserum

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This section, once again, is basically one long excerpt of text from Chapter Thirt-Five, reaching from page 670 to 691 of the American hardcover edition, but it has been very heavily altered throughout (with Crouch Jr.’s lengthy exposition truncated to avoid needless repetition).

Harry felt himself slam flat into the ground; his face was pressed into grass; the smell of it filled his nostrils. He had closed his eyes while the Portkey transported him, and he kept them closed now. He did not move. All the breath seemed to have been knocked out of him; his head was swimming so badly he felt as though the ground beneath him were swaying like the deck of a ship. To hold himself steady, he tightened his hold on the two things he was still clutching: the smooth, cold handle of the Triwizard Cup and his phoenix-feather wand. He felt as though he would slide away into the blackness gathering at the edges of his brain if he let go of either of them. Shock and exhaustion kept him on the ground, breathing in the smell of the grass, waiting…waiting for someone to do something…something to happen…and all the while, his scar burned dully on his forehead….

A torrent of sound deafened and confused him; there were voices everywhere, footsteps, cheering…. He remained where he was, his face screwed up against the noise, as though it were a nightmare that would pass….

Then a pair of hands seized him gently and turned him over.

“Are you all right, Harry?”

He opened his eyes.

He was looking up at the starry sky, and Albus Dumbledore was crouched over him. The dark shadows of a crowd of people pressed in around them, pushing nearer; Harry felt the ground beneath his head reverberating with their footsteps.

“Please fetch Madam Pomfrey, Charity; I know she is still tending to Mr. Krum, but I believe Harry here is in more urgent need of her attentions….”

He had come back to the edge of the maze. He could see the stands rising above him, the shapes of people moving in them, the stars above.

He let go of the Cup, but he tightened his grip on his wand. He raised his free hand and seized Dumbledore’s wrist, while Dumbledore’s face swam in and out of focus.

“He’s back,” Harry whispered. “He’s back. Voldemort.”

The warm smile vanished from Dumbledore’s face.

“Let’s see him, then, let’s see our Triwizard champion!”

The face of Cornelius Fudge appeared upside down over Harry; he was beaming, his teeth gleaming in the light from the torches that lined the stands around the maze.

“What did you say, Harry?” said Dumbledore, ignoring Fudge.

“The Cup was a Portkey,” Harry said, “it took me to a graveyard—he was there, with Wormtail—he brought him back, we fought—I just got away—Professor, he’s back!”

Dumbledore bent down, and with extraordinary strength for a man so old and thin, raised Harry from the ground and set him on his feet. Harry swayed. His head was pounding. His injured leg would no longer support his weight. The crowd around them jostled, fighting to get closer, pressing darkly in on him—they were still cheering; they didn’t know, they thought that Harry had just returned from winning the tournament….

Someone, somewhere, started to sing the school song.

“Let’s get him up where people can see him,” Fudge suggested, “get a good shot for the photographers, eh? Hold the Cup up, Harry, here you go….”

The Cup was pressed again into Harry’s hand but he recoiled from it as though it might bite him. “NO!” he shouted. “Keep that away from me—don’t touch it—it’s dangerous!”

Fudge fell back, looking startled. “Er—maybe to the hospital wing, first,” he suggested weakly. “The celebration can wait until Harry’s feeling more—er—more himself….”

“Good idea for once, Fudge,” said a gruff voice, and a hand clamped tightly on Harry’s shoulder. “I’ll walk Potter up there, shall I, headmaster?”

“No, Alastor, I would prefer that Harry stay right where he is for the moment—excuse me, Cornelius, there is something I must see to—no, Charity, we really need Poppy right now, I am afraid it cannot wait until she is finished. Mr. Krum will be none the worse for wear for waiting a few moments, and I need Harry comfortable and coherent enough to answer a few questions….”

“Dumbledore, what’s going on? What’s happened?”

“Come with me, Minister, I will explain as we walk. Harry, stay there, I shall be only a moment— No, Cornelius, tell those people to keep their cameras away, now is not the time….”

Flashbulbs were going off…. People were whooping and cheering hysterically…. The scene flickered oddly before Harry’s eyes….

“It’s all right, son, I’ve got you…come on…hospital wing…”

“Dumbledore said stay,” said Harry thickly, the pounding in his scar making him feel as though he was about to throw up; his vision was blurring worse than ever.

“You need to lie down…. Come on now….”

Someone larger and stronger than he was was half pulling, half carrying him through the raucous crowd. Harry heard people yelling his name, cheering, singing; several people reached out to slap him on the back or grab for his fingers, trying to shake his hand as the man supporting him pushed a path through them, taking him back to the castle. It was all Harry could do to shove his wand into his pocket before he dropped it. Across the lawn, past the lake and the Durmstrang ship, Harry heard nothing but the heavy breathing of the man helping him walk.

“What happened, Harry?” the man asked at last as he lifted Harry up the stone steps. _Clunk. Clunk. Clunk._ It was Mad-Eye Moody.

“Cup was a Portkey,” said Harry as they crossed the entrance hall. “Took me to a graveyard…and You-Know-Who was there…Lord Voldemort…”

 _Clunk. Clunk. Clunk._ Up the marble stairs…

“The Dark Lord was there? What happened then?”

“Made a potion…got his body back….”

“The Dark Lord got his body back? He’s returned?”

“And the Death Eaters came…I knew some of them, I thought I knew them….”

“And then?”

 _Clunk. Clunk. Clunk._ Along the corridor…

“And then we dueled….”

“You dueled with the Dark Lord?”

“Got away…my wand…did something funny…. I saw my mum and dad…they came out of his wand….”

“In here, Harry…in here, and sit down…. You’ll be all right now…drink this….”

Harry heard a key scrape in a lock and felt a cup being pushed into his hands.

“Drink it…you’ll feel better…come on, now, Harry, I need to know exactly what happened….”

Moody helped tip the stuff down Harry’s throat; he coughed, a peppery taste burning his throat. Moody’s office came into sharper focus, and so did Moody himself…. He looked as white as Voldemort’s snakelike visage, and both eyes were fixed unblinkingly upon Harry’s face.

“Voldemort’s back, Harry? You’re sure he’s back? How did he do it?”

“He took stuff from his father’s grave, and from Wormtail, and me,” said Harry. His head felt clearer; his scar wasn’t hurting so badly; he could now see Moody’s face distinctly, even though the office was dark. He could still hear cheering and singing from the distant Quidditch field.

“What did the Dark Lord take from you?” said Moody.

“Blood,” said Harry, raising his arm. His sleeve was ripped where Wormtail’s dagger had torn it.

Moody let out his breath in a long, low hiss.

“And the Death Eaters? They returned?”

“Yes,” said Harry, and his stomach gave a lurch as he remembered the look on Mr. Malfoy’s face as Voldemort laughed…. “Yes, and some of—some of them…I knew….”

“How did he treat them?” Moody asked quietly, as though he hadn't heard Harry; as though he didn't care who the Death Eaters were. “Did he forgive them?”

But Harry had suddenly remembered. He should have told Dumbledore, he should have said it straightaway—

“There’s a Death Eater at Hogwarts! There’s a Death Eater here—they put my name in the Goblet of Fire, they made sure I got through to the end—”

Harry tried to get up, but Moody pushed him back down.

“I know who the Death Eater is,” he said quietly.

“I don’t mean Snape,” Harry said irritably, “you should never have been looking at Snape, he’s already saved me loads of times before, he switched sides just like Dumbledore said he did—”

Moody gave a strange, harsh little laugh. “Snape!” he crowed. “No, never Snape, Harry….”

“Karkaroff, then?” said Harry wildly. “Where is he? Have you got him? Is he locked up?”

“Karkaroff?” said Moody with another odd laugh. “Karkaroff fled tonight, when he felt the Dark Mark burn upon his arm. He betrayed too many faithful supporters of the Dark Lord to wish to meet them…but I doubt he will get far. The Dark Lord has ways of tracking his enemies.”

“Karkaroff’s _gone?_ He ran away? But then—he didn’t put my name in the goblet?”

“No,” said Moody slowly. “No, he didn’t. It was I who did that.”

Harry heard, but didn’t believe.

“No, you didn’t,” he said. “You didn’t do that…you can’t have done…”

“I assure you I did,” said Moody, and his magical eye swung around and fixed upon the door, and Harry knew he was making sure there was no one outside it. At the same time, Moody drew out his wand and pointed it at Harry.

“He forgave them, then?” he said. “The Death Eaters who went free? The ones who escaped Azkaban?”

“What?” said Harry.

He was looking at the wand Moody was pointing at him. It was like Mr. Malfoy all over again….

“I asked you,” said Moody quietly, “whether he forgave the scum who never even went to look for him. Those treacherous cowards who wouldn’t even brave Azkaban for him. The faithless, worthless bits of filth who were brave enough to cavort in masks at the Quidditch World Cup, but fled at the sight of the Dark Mark when I fired it into the sky.”

“ _You_ fired… What are you talking about…?”

“I told you, Harry…I told you. If there’s one thing I hate more than any other, it’s a Death Eater who walked free. They turned their backs on my master when he needed them most. I expected him to punish them. I expected him to torture them. Tell me he hurt them, Harry….” Moody’s face was suddenly lit with an insane smile. “Tell me he told them that I, I alone remained faithful…prepared to risk everything to deliver to him the one thing he wanted above all… _you.”_

“It was you all along,” Harry said slowly. “You even explained it the night the champions were chosen—you said that you’d have put my name in under a different school, Confund the Goblet of Fire into thinking there were four instead of three, so I’d be sure to be picked…. Karkaroff was right all along….”

Moody chuckled. “That’s right,” he said, “it was me—all of it, all along. Who frightened off every person I thought might try to hurt you or prevent you from winning the tournament? I did. Who nudged Hagrid into showing you the dragons? I did. Who gave Gregory Goyle the book that told you about gillyweed? _I did.”_

Moody’s magical eye had now left the door. It was fixed upon Harry. His lopsided mouth leered more widely than ever.

“It hasn’t been easy, Harry, guiding you through these tasks without arousing suspicion. I have had to use every ounce of cunning I possess, so that my hand would not be detectable in your success. Dumbledore would have been very suspicious if you had managed everything too easily. As long as you into that maze, preferably with a decent head start—then, I knew, I would have a chance of getting rid of the other champions and leaving your way clear. But I also had to contend with your stupidity. The second task…that was when I was most afraid we would fail. I was keeping watch on you, Potter. I knew you hadn’t worked out the egg’s clue, so I had to give you another hint—”

“You told Cedric, because you knew he would tell me in repayment for the tip about the dragons,” Harry said hoarsely. “You used his decency against him….”

“To help you, yes,” said Moody. “Decent people are so easy to manipulate, Potter. But your stubborn pride held you back from using what he told you. I was on the brink of doing something desperate when Lucius’s smarmy little brat forced your hand…first time I’ve ever been pleased to have a Malfoy around….” Moody chortled. “Bet it was a shock for you, seeing his dad tonight, eh? If he had the guts to come, that is?”

Harry, too horrified to speak, nodded automatically.

“Yes, he always was a dutiful servant, Malfoy—as long as there was someone watching to impress, anyway…seems his brat’s cut from the same cloth, eh? Still, you’ve made good use of the tools you had to hand; for a while there I actually thought you had potential…but then….” He shook his head, a disgusted scowl settling over his crooked features.

Moody’s wand was still pointing directly at Harry’s heart. Over his shoulder, foggy shapes were moving in the Foe-Glass on the wall.

“You were so long in the lake, Potter, I thought you had drowned. But luckily, Dumbledore took your idiocy for nobility, and marked you high for it. I breathed again.

“You had an easier time of it than you should have in that maze tonight, of course,” said Moody. “I was patrolling around it, able to see through the outer hedges, able to curse many obstacles out of your way. I Stunned Fleur Delacour as she passed. I put the Imperius Charm on Krum, so that he would finish Diggory and leave your path to the Cup clear.”

Harry stared at Moody. How could it be that Dumbledore’s friend, the famous Auror…the one who had caught so many Death Eaters…how could he be yet another of Voldemort’s servants? How had no one ever suspected? Moody, Mr. Malfoy, Mr. Nott…Crabbe and Goyle’s fathers, too… It made no sense…no sense at all….

The foggy shapes in the Foe-Glass were sharpening, had become more distinct. Harry could see the outlines of four people over Moody’s shoulder, moving closer and closer. But Moody wasn’t watching them. His magical eye was upon Harry.

“The Dark Lord didn’t manage to kill you, Potter, and he _so_ wanted to,” whispered Moody. “Imagine how he will reward me when he finds I have done it for him. I gave you to him—the thing he needed above all to make his triumphant return—and then I killed you for him. I will be honored beyond all other Death Eaters. I will be his dearest, his closest supporter…closer than a son….”

Moody’s normal eye was bulging, the magical eye fixed upon Harry. The door was barred, and Harry knew he would never reach his own wand in time….

“The Dark Lord and I,” said Moody, and he looked completely insane now, towering over Harry, leering down at him, “have much in common. Both of us, for instance, had very disappointing fathers…very disappointing indeed. Both of us suffered the indignity, Harry, of being named after those fathers. And both of us had the pleasure…the very great pleasure…of killing our fathers to ensure the continued rise of the Dark Order!”

“You’re mad,” Harry said—he couldn’t stop himself—“you’re mad!”

“Mad, am I?” said Moody, his voice rising uncontrollably. “We’ll see! We’ll see who’s mad, now that the Dark Lord has returned, with me at his side! He is back, Harry Potter, you did not conquer him—and now—I conquer you!”

Moody raised his wand, he opened his mouth; Harry plunged his own hand into his robes—

“ _Stupefy!”_ There was a blinding flash of red light, and with a great splintering and crashing, the door of Moody’s office was blasted apart—

Moody was thrown backward onto the office floor. Harry, still staring at the place where Moody’s face had been, saw Albus Dumbledore, Professor Snape, Professor Lupin, and Professor McGonagall looking back at him out of the Foe-Glass. He looked around and saw the four of them standing in the doorway, Dumbledore in front, his wand outstretched.

At that moment, Harry fully understood for the first time why people said Dumbledore was the only wizard Voldemort had ever feared. The look upon Dumbledore’s face as he stared down at the unconscious form of Mad-Eye Moody was more terrible than Harry could have ever imagined. There was no benign smile upon Dumbledore’s face, no twinkle in the eyes behind the spectacles. There was cold fury in every line of the ancient face; a sense of power radiated from Dumbledore as though he were giving off burning heat.

He stepped into the office, placed a foot underneath Moody’s unconscious body, and kicked him over onto his back, so that his face was visible. Snape followed him, looking into the Foe-Glass, where his own face was still visible, glaring into the room. Professor McGonagall peered into the room’s corners, as if expecting other attackers to manifest, her wand held out at the ready. Professor Lupin went straight to Harry.

“Are you all right, Harry?” he asked. The gray streaks in his brown hair were more visible than ever and his face looked as lined and tired as Harry had ever seen it. “Let’s get you to the hospital wing, Madam Pomfrey will get you fixed up in a trice….”

“No,” said Dumbledore sharply.

“Surely—surely he’s been through enough tonight, sir, we can excuse him from—from the rest of what needs doing—”

“He will stay, Remus, because he needs to understand,” said Dumbledore curtly. “Understanding is the first step to acceptance, and only with acceptance can there be recovery. He needs to know who has put him through the ordeal he has suffered tonight, and why.”

“Moody,” Harry said. He was still in a state of confused fury. “How can it have been Moody? How can nobody have known?”

“This is not Alastor Moody,” said Dumbledore quietly. “You have never known Alastor Moody. The real Moody would not have removed you from my sight after what happened tonight. The moment he took you, I knew—and I followed.”

Dumbledore bent down over Moody’s limp form and put a hand inside his robes. He pulled out Moody’s hip flask and a set of keys on a ring. Then he turned to Professors McGonagall and Snape.

“Severus, please fetch me the strongest Truth Potion you possess, and then go down to the kitchens and bring up the house-elf called Winky. Minerva, kindly go down to Hagrid’s hut, where you will find a large fawn-colored dog sitting in the pumpkin patch. Take the dog up to my office, tell him I will be with him shortly, then come back here.”

If either Snape or McGonagall found these instructions peculiar, they hid their confusion. Both turned at once and left the office. “Remus,” Dumbledore continued, and Professor Lupin looked up sharply. “Please return to the Quidditch field and collect Harry’s friends. I need someone to keep an eye on them until we can be sure that tonight’s troubles have ended—but do not let on that you are watching them for any reason other than to supervise until Harry can return to them.”

Lupin nodded quickly and said, “Of course.” He gave Harry’s shoulder a quick squeeze, then rose back to his feet and hurried out of the room.

Dumbledore walked over to the trunk with seven locks, fitted the first key in the lock, and opened it. It contained a mass of spellbooks. Dumbledore closed the trunk, placed a second key in the second lock, and opened the trunk again. The spellbooks had vanished; this time it contained an assortment of broken Sneakoscopes, some parchment and quills, and what looked like a silvery Invisibility Cloak. Harry watched, astounded, as Dumbledore placed the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth keys in their respective locks, reopening the trunk, and each time revealing different contents. Then he placed the seventh key in the lock, threw open the lid, and Harry let out a cry of amazement.

He was looking down into a kind of pit, an underground room, and lying on the floor some ten feet below, apparently fast asleep, thin and starved in appearance, was the real Mad-Eye Moody. His wooden leg was gone, the socket that should have held the magical eye looked empty beneath its lid, and chunks of his grizzled hair were missing. Harry stared, thunderstruck, between the sleeping Moody in the trunk and the unconscious Moody lying on the floor of the office.

Dumbledore climbed into the trunk, lowered himself, and fell lightly onto the floor beside the sleeping Moody. He bent over him.

“Stunned—controlled by the Imperius Curse—very weak,” he said. “Of course, they would have needed to keep him alive. Harry, throw down the impostor's cloak—he’s freezing. Madam Pomfrey will need to see him, but he seems in no immediate danger.

Harry did as he was told; Dumbledore covered Moody in the cloak, tucked it around him, and clambered out of the trunk again. Then he picked up the hip flask that stood upon the desk, unscrewed it, and turned it over. A thick glutinous liquid splattered onto the office floor.

“Polyjuice Potion, Harry,” said Dumbledore. “You see the simplicity of it, and the brilliance. For Moody never _does_ drink except from his hip flask, he’s well known for it. The impostor needed, of course, to keep the real Moody close by, so that he could continue making the potion. You see his hair…” Dumbledore looked down on the Moody in the trunk. “The impostor has been cutting it off all year, see where it is uneven? But I think, in the excitement of tonight, our fake Moody might have forgotten to take it as frequently as he should have done…on the hour…every hour…. We shall see.”

Dumbledore pulled out the chair at the desk and sat down upon it, his eyes fixed upon the unconscious Moody on the floor. Harry stared at him too. Minutes passed in silence….

Then, before Harry’s very eyes, the face of the man on the floor began to change. The scars were disappearing, the skin was becoming smooth; the mangled nose became whole and started to shrink. The long mane of grizzled gray hair was withdrawing into the scalp and turning the color of straw. Suddenly, with a loud _clunk_ , the wooden leg fell away as a normal leg regrew in its place; next moment, the magical eyeball had popped out of the man’s face as a real eye replaced it; it rolled away across the floor and continued to swivel in every direction.

Harry saw a man lying before him, pale-skinned, slightly freckled, with a mop of fair hair. He knew who he was. He had seen him in Dumbledore’s Pensieve, had watched him being led away from court by the dementors, trying to convince Mr. Crouch that he was innocent…but he was lined around the eyes now and looked much older…

There were hurried footsteps outside in the corridor. Professor Snape had returned with Winky at his heels. Professor McGonagall was right behind him.

“Crouch!” Professor Snape said, stopping dead in the doorway. “Barty Crouch!”

“Good heavens,” said Professor McGonagall, stopping dead and staring down at the man on the floor.

Filthy, disheveled, Winky peered around Snape’s legs. Her mouth opened wide and she let out a piercing shriek.

“Master Barty, Master Barty, what is you doing here?”

She flung herself forward onto the young man’s chest.

“You is killed him! You is killed him! You is killed Master’s son!”

“He is simply Stunned, Winky,” said Dumbledore. “Step aside, please. Severus, you have the potion?”

Professor Snape handed Dumbledore a small glass of completely clear liquid; to Harry it looked like nothing more threatening than water, but the reverent way Professor Snape held the little vial told him that it was something much more precious. Dumbledore got up, bent over the man on the floor, and pulled him into a sitting position against the wall beneath the Foe-Glass, in which the reflections of Dumbledore, Snape, Lupin, and McGonagall were still glaring down upon them all. Winky remained on her knees, trembling, her hands over her face. Dumbledore forced the man’s mouth open and poured three drops inside it. Then he pointed his wand at the man’s chest and said, _“Rennervate.”_

Crouch’s son opened his eyes. His face was slack, his gaze unfocused. Dumbledore knelt before him, so that their faces were level.

“Can you hear me?” Dumbledore asked quietly.

The man’s eyelids flickered.

“Yes,” he muttered.

“I would like you to tell us,” said Dumbledore softly, “how you came to be here. How did you escape from Azkaban?”

Harry listened, horrified and intrigued all at the same time, as Crouch’s son explained in a monotonous voice the deception that had exchanged one prison for another; listened as he spoke of Bertha Jorkins, and the Quidditch World Cup, and the theft of Harry’s wand…listened as he spoke of wanting to punish the Death Eaters for their lack of loyalty to his master…listened as he explained how Voldemort had known to come for him, how they had subdued Mr. Crouch…how they had concocted their plan to insert Barty Crouch Jr. within Hogwarts in Alastor Moody’s place…how he had killed his own father with the aid of Harry’s map….

“For a week I waited for my father to arrive at Hogwarts. At last, one evening, the map showed my father entering the grounds. I pulled on my Invisibility Cloak and went down to meet him. He was walking around the edge of the forest. Before I could act, he stumbled across two students snogging in the bushes. I waited. I knew I could not kill them, not without drawing more attention than I could risk. Before I could maneuver myself into a position to Stun them both, one fled to the castle, leaving the other behind. It was easy, then, to sneak up on the distracted boy without being seen. I Stunned him. I killed my father.”

“ _Noooo!”_ wailed Winky. “Master Barty, Master Barty, what is you saying?”

“You killed your father,” Dumbledore said, in the same soft voice. “What did you do with the body?”

“Carried it into the forest. Covered it with the Invisibility Cloak. I had the map with me. I watched Stimpson run into the castle. She met Snape. Dumbledore joined them. I watched Snape and the girl wait while Dumbledore came out of the castle. I walked back out of the forest, doubled around behind them, went to meet them. I told Dumbledore Snape had told me where to come.

“Dumbledore told me to go and look for my father. I went back to my father’s body. Watched the map. When everyone was far enough away, I Transfigured my father’s body. He became a bone…I buried it, while wearing the Invisibility Cloak, in the freshly dug earth in front of Hagrid’s cabin.”

There was complete silence now, except for Winky’s continued sobs. Then Dumbledore said, “And tonight…”

“I offered to carry the Triwizard Cup into the maze before dinner,” whispered Barty Crouch. “Turned it into a Portkey. My master’s plan worked. He is returned to power and I will be honored by him beyond the dreams of wizards.”

The insane smile lit his features once more, and his head drooped onto his shoulder as Winky wailed and sobbed at his side.

 


	33. The Parting of the Ways

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This section contains a number of excerpts, all heavily altered, from Chapter Thirty-Six reaching from page 692 to page 715 of the American hardcover edition. However, despite using the original printing of _The Goblet of Fire_ as my source of quotations throughout this story, I have chosen to update the excerpted text herein to compensate for the error Rowling made when she first wrote the book (having James emerge from Voldemort’s wand before Lily) in the interest of accuracy. All other quoted text remains unchanged from the original published version of the American hardcover.

Dumbledore stood up. He stared down at Barty Crouch for a moment with disgust on his face. Then he raised his wand once more and ropes flew out of it, ropes that twisted themselves around Barty Crouch, binding him tightly. He turned to Professor McGonagall.

“Minerva, could I ask you to stand guard here while I take Harry upstairs?”

“Of course,” said Professor McGonagall. She looked slightly nauseated, as though she had just watched someone being sick. However, when she drew out her wand and pointed it at Barty Crouch, her hand was quite steady.

“Severus” —Dumbledore turned to Professor Snape— “please tell Madam Pomfrey to come down here; we need to get Alastor Moody into the hospital wing. Then go down to the grounds, find Cornelius Fudge, and bring him up to this office. He will undoubtedly want to question Crouch himself. Tell him I will be in the hospital wing in half an hour’s time if he needs me. Once you have done that, please come to the hospital wing yourself. I believe that your student here could use some words of wisdom regarding loyalty, and choices, and friendship.”

Snape started, his black eyes going wide for a moment, but he nodded without speaking and swept out of the room.

“Harry?” Dumbledore said gently.

Harry got up and swayed again; the pain in his leg, which he had not noticed all the time he had been listening to Crouch, now returned in full measure. He also realized that he was shaking. Dumbledore gripped his arm and helped him out into the dark corridor.

“I want you to come up to my office first, Harry,” he said quietly as they headed up the passageway. “Sirius is waiting for us there.”

Harry nodded. A kind of numbness and a sense of complete unreality were upon him, but he did not care; he was even glad of it. He didn’t want to think about anything that had happened since he had first touched the Triwizard Cup. He didn’t want to have to examine the memories, fresh and sharp as photographs, which kept flashing across his mind. Mad-Eye Moody, inside the trunk. Wormtail, slumped on the ground, cradling the stump of his arm. Voldemort, rising from the steaming cauldron. Mr. Malfoy, staring at Harry, and then looking fixedly away….

“Professor,” Harry mumbled, “do you—do you know who Voldemort’s Death Eaters are? The ones who aren’t in Azkaban, I mean?”

“I know a few of them, Harry,” said Dumbledore in the same calm voice with which he had spoken throughout the interrogation of Barty Crouch. “I do not believe that anyone save for Voldemort himself knows all of their identities, nor the extent of their numbers. But I have, of course, certain suspicions about many of the others, yes.”

He said nothing more, and Harry could not bring himself to ask.

They had reached the stone gargoyle. Dumbledore gave the password, it sprang aside, and he and Harry went up the moving spiral staircase to the oak door. Dumbledore pushed it open. Sirius was standing there. His face was white and gaunt as it had been when he had escaped Azkaban but his long hair was a light golden color. Harry gaped at him. In one swift moment, he had crossed the room.

“Harry, are you all right? I knew it—I knew something like this—what happened?”

His hands shook as he helped Harry into a chair in front of the desk.

“Your—your hair,” Harry said dumbly, “how—why—?”

“I asked your friend Hermione to meet me on the road up from Hogsmeade before the Task. She cast a Color Changing Charm so I wouldn’t be so easily recognized. It hasn’t worn off yet, but never mind my hair. What happened to you?” he asked more urgently.

Dumbledore began to tell Sirius everything Barty Crouch had said. Harry was only half-listening. So tired every bone in his body was aching, he wanted nothing more than to sit there, undisturbed, for hours and hours, until he fell asleep and didn’t have to think or feel anymore.

There was a soft rush of wings. Fawkes the phoenix had left his perch, flown across the office, and landed on Harry’s knee.

“’Lo, Fawkes,” said Harry quietly. Too tired to be surprised, he stroked the phoenix’s beautiful scarlet-and-gold plumage. Fawkes blinked peacefully up at him. There was something comforting about his warm weight.

Dumbledore stopped talking. He sat down opposite Harry, behind his desk. He was looking at Harry, who avoided his eyes. Dumbledore was going to question him. He was going to make Harry relive everything. He was going to make him tell what— _who_ —he had seen.

“I need to know what happened after you touched the Portkey in the maze, Harry,” said Dumbledore.

“We can leave that till morning, can’t we, Dumbledore?” said Sirius harshly. He had put a hand on Harry’s shoulder. “Let him have a sleep. Let him rest.”

Harry felt a rush of gratitude toward Sirius, but Dumbledore took no notice of Sirius’s words. He leaned forward toward Harry. Very unwillingly, Harry raised his head and looked into those blue eyes.

“If I thought I could help you,” Dumbledore said gently, “by putting you into an enchanted sleep and allowing you to postpone the moment when you would have to think about what has happened tonight, I would do it. But I know better. Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it. You have shown bravery beyond anything I could have expected of you. I ask you to demonstrate your courage one more time. I ask you to tell us what happened.”

The phoenix let out one soft, quavering note. Suddenly Harry realized what the noise coming from his and Voldemort’s wands when they connected had been: phoenix song. It shivered in the air, and Harry felt as though a drop of hot liquid had slipped down his throat into his stomach, warming him, and strengthening him.

He took a deep breath and began to tell them. As he spoke, visions of everything that had passed that night seemed to rise before his eyes; he saw the sparkling surface of the potion that had revived Voldemort; he saw the Death Eaters Apparating between the graves around them; he saw familiar eyes staring at him from behind silver masks.

Once or twice, Sirius made a noise as though about to say something, his hand still tight on Harry’s shoulder, but Dumbledore raised a hand to stop him, and Harry was glad of this, because it was easier to keep going now he had started. It was even a relief; he felt almost as though something poisonous were being extracted from him. It was costing him every bit of determination he had to keep talking, yet he sensed that once he had finished, he would feel better.

When Harry told of Wormtail piercing his arm with the dagger, however, Sirius let out a vehement exclamation and Dumbledore stood up so quickly that Harry started. Dumbledore walked around the desk and told Harry to stretch out his arm. Harry showed them both the place where his robes were torn and the cut beneath them.

“Moody—I mean, Crouch—had told him what had happened to the memory of Tom Riddle when I touched him in the Chamber of Secrets,” Harry told Dumbledore. “That seemed to be really important to him—that the protection my—my mother left in me—he’d have it too. And he was right—he could touch me without hurting himself, and the Riddle from the diary, he couldn’t do that; he touched my face.”

For a fleeting instant, Harry thought he saw a gleam of something like triumph in Dumbledore’s eyes. But next second, Harry was sure he had imagined it, for when Dumbledore had returned to his seat behind the desk, he looked as old and weary as Harry had ever seen him.

“Very well,” he said, sitting down again. “Voldemort has overcome that particular barrier.”

“But Professor,” Harry said, “how could he have known about that when he was planning to—to use me for his resurrection? He didn’t know what had happened in the Chamber of Secrets until Crouch told him….”

“I expect that Voldemort wanted to use you, Harry, to fuel his return largely out of a desire to clean-up loose ends; to prove to himself, and to others, that the mistake of his defeat had been rectified, absolved. Your role was, I believe, initially to be a symbolic one…and perhaps the scheme to spirit you away was a simpler one, too, at first; when they learned about the effects of your mother’s sacrifice, however….” He shook his head. “There may have been other practical considerations, but speculation along those lines will not be helpful now. I am sure that when Crouch is questioned more thoroughly, we will all learn many more details of their schemes, but for now….” He shook his silvery head again. “Harry, continue, please.”

Harry went on; he explained how Voldemort had emerged from the cauldron, and told them all he could remember of Voldemort’s speech to the Death Eaters. He hesitated, not wanting to share the names of the Death Eaters that Voldemort had summoned; not wanting to admit before Dumbledore and Sirius how foolish, how blind he had been…. He swallowed hard and said, “He was angry at his Death Eaters, angry that they were free to come to him…he said that the Lestranges should have been there…someone named Macnair, he was there, he’s doing something with dangerous creatures for the Ministry….someone else named Avery, he was angry with him too, he tortured him….” Harry took a deep breath and forced himself to say, “And Mr. Nott…Theodore’s father…he was there….”

His voice trailed-off; it was hard to get the words out. He had to force them past a great lump in his throat. “And G—goyle…someone named Goyle was there, and someone else named Crabbe….” Harry feel silent, hoping that Sirius or Dumbledore would speak, would tell him that it had been a _different_ Goyle, a _different_ Crabbe who had been there; that they would tell him that there had been a Mr. Goyle and a Mr. Crabbe who had been suspected of being Death Eaters, but never proved, and that they were no relation to his friends at all, but neither of them spoke.

Harry squeezed his eyes shut, trying to shut-out visions of his friends’ faces, of how they would react—Vincent, furious and betrayed; and Gregory, his thick face crumpling with hurt…and Draco. His best friend, the person who had guided him through the Wizarding World ever since they had boarded the Hogwarts Express together—how would Draco react if Harry named his beloved father as one of Lord Voldemort’s Death Eaters?

Harry looked up and saw Dumbledore’s blue eyes tight on him. He couldn’t meet the headmaster’s gaze; he dropped his eyes to his lap and mumbled, “I don’t remember who else was there, he only named a few of them….”

“I see,” said Dumbledore. His voice was almost unbearably kind. “Please continue.”

Harry dashed tears from his eyes—when had he started crying?—and told how Voldemort had untied him, returned his wand to him, and prepared to duel.

But when he reached the part where the golden beam of light had connected his and Voldemort’s wand, he found words failing him once again. He tried to keep talking, but the memories of what had come out of Voldemort’s wand were flooding into his mind. He could see the old man emerging, Bertha Jorkins…his mother …his father …

He was glad when Sirius broke the silence.

“The wands connected?” he said, looking from Harry to Dumbledore. “Why?”

Harry looked up at Dumbledore again, on whose face there was an arrested look.

“ _Priori Incantatem,”_ he murmured.

His eyes gazed into Harry’s and it was almost as though an invisible beam of understanding shot between them.

“The Reverse Spell effect?” said Sirius sharply.

“Exactly,” said Dumbledore. “Harry’s wand and Voldemort’s wand share cores. Each of them contains a feather from the tail of the same phoenix. _This_ phoenix, in fact,” he added, and he pointed at the scarlet-and-gold bird, perching peacefully on Harry’s knee.

“My wand’s feather came from Fawkes?” Harry said, amazed.

“Yes,” said Dumbledore. “Mr. Ollivander wrote to tell me you had bought the second wand, the moment you left his shop four years ago.”

“So what happens when a wand meets its brother?” said Sirius.

“They will not work properly against each other,” said Dumbledore. “If, however, the owners of the wands force the wands to do battle…a very rare effect will take place. One of the wands will force the other to regurgitate spells it has performed—in reverse. The most recent first…and then those which preceded it….”

He looked interrogatively at Harry, and Harry nodded.

“Which means,” said Dumbledore slowly, his eyes upon Harry’s face, “that some form of all those most recently murdered by Voldemort must have reappeared.”

Harry nodded again.

“His victims came back to life?” said Sirius sharply.

“No spell can reawaken the dead,” said Dumbledore heavily. “All that would have happened is a kind of reverse echo. A shadow of the living victims would have emerged from the wand…am I correct, Harry?”

“They spoke to me,” Harry said. He was suddenly shaking again. “They said they would—they would help me. An old man…Bertha Jorkins. And…”

“Your parents?” said Dumbledore quietly.

“Yes,” said Harry.

Sirius’s grip on Harry’s shoulder was now so tight it was painful.

“The last murders the wand performed,” said Dumbledore, nodding. “In reverse order. More would have appeared, of course, had you maintained the connection. Very well, Harry, these echoes, these shadows…what did they do?”

Harry described how the figures that had emerged from the wand had prowled the edges of the golden web, how Voldemort had seemed to fear them, how the shadow of Harry’s parents had told him what to do, how they had protected him from Voldemort so he could flee….

At this point, Harry found he could not continue. He looked around at Sirius and saw that he had his face in his hands.

Harry suddenly became aware that Fawkes had left his knee. The phoenix had fluttered to the floor. It was resting its beautiful head against Harry’s injured leg, and thick, pearly tears were falling from its eyes onto the wound left by the spider. The pain vanished. The skin mended. His leg was repaired.

“I will say it again,” said Dumbledore as the phoenix rose into the air and resettled itself upon the perch beside the door. “You have shown bravery beyond anything I could have expected of you tonight, Harry. You have shown bravery equal to those who died fighting Voldemort at the height of his powers. You have shouldered a grown wizard’s burden and found yourself equal to it—and you have now given us all that we have a right to expect. You will come with me to the hospital wing. I do not want you returning to the dormitory tonight—perhaps, in fact, it would be better if you slept in the hospital wing for the remainder of this last week…but that is a question best addressed by Professor Snape, I think. For now, a Sleeping Potion, and some peace…Sirius, would you like to stay with him?”

Sirius nodded and stood up. Hermione's spell was still holing and he looked very odd with his hair charmed; even his eyebrows were affected. He transformed back into the great dog—paler than usual, but recognizable as the same one that had once chased Harry across the entrance hall—and walked with Harry and Dumbledore out of the office, accompanying them down a flight of stairs to the hospital wing.

When Dumbledore pushed open the door, Harry saw Draco, Hermione, Crabbe, Goyle, Daphne, Pansy, and Ron grouped around a harassed-looking Madam Pomfrey. Professor Lupin stood a little way apart, his face drawn, watching the others. They appeared to be demanding to know where Harry was and what had happened to him. The other three champions were there too: Krum hunched miserably on a bed alone on one side of the room; Cedric and Fleur standing close together on the other side, glaring at Krum. All of them whipped around as Harry, Dumbledore, and the fawn-colored dog entered, and Lupin let out an audible gasp. His eyes flicked briefly to the dog, then returned to Harry.

“How are you?” he asked, seeming to speak to the dog as much as to Harry, but his words were almost drowned-out by the cry Draco gave:

“Harry! What happened?”

Harry stopped dead at the sight of his friends and stared at them as if he had never seen any of them before.

“Nobody will tell us—you were gone so long after Diggory came out—I mean of course you won, but what else—where did you go—?” Draco started to hurry forward, Crabbe and Goyle falling in on his heels like always, but Dumbledore moved between them.

“Everyone,” he said, holding up a hand, “please listen to me for a moment. Harry has been through a terrible ordeal tonight. He has just had to relive it for me. What he needs now is sleep, and peace, and quiet. I would like those of you who are students here to return to your dormitories. Miss Delacour, Mr. Krum, I am sure your teachers—or at least in your case, Mr. Krum, your classmates—would prefer you to rejoin them before they start worrying unduly. Remus, you may stay if Harry would like you to. But I do not want anyone questioning him until he is ready to answer, and certainly not this evening.”

“Of course,” said Professor Lupin in a very hoarse voice.

Draco, predictably, protested at once. “That’s not fair!” he said. “What do we have to leave for? Harry doesn’t want us to go—do you, Harry?” he asked.

Harry stared at his friend, struggling to find words. “I think—I think I’d just like to sleep—” he said, looking away so he would not have to see the hurt, confused look on Draco’s pointed face.

“Headmaster,” said Madam Pomfrey, staring at the great dog that was Sirius, “may I ask what—?”

“This dog will be remaining with Harry for a while,” said Dumbledore simply. “I assure you, he is extremely well trained. Harry—I will wait while you get into bed.”

Harry felt an inexpressible sense of gratitude to Dumbledore for sending the others away. He couldn’t face them, not right now, with the memory of what their fathers had done—of who their fathers _were_ —so fresh in his mind. He supposed he would have to talk to them eventually, but the thought of talking to them now, the idea of reliving it all one more time, was more than he could stand.

“Well I won’t have Viktor sent away just yet,” Madam Pomfrey said belligerently. “He’s in no fit state to go off by himself, especially with no teacher to look after him….”

“I vill be fine,” Krum mumbled, still looking at the floor.

“I want to stay too, Professor,” Cedric said suddenly. “I’m a—I was a Hogwarts champion too. I should…I think I should stay with Harry.” His eyes flicked sideways, to where Krum sat hunched in on himself on the other side of the room. “I can keep an eye on things here, at least,” Cedric said quietly, his gray eyes hard and suspicious.

Dumbledore inspected Cedric silently. Then he jerked his head in a small nod. “Very well,” he said, “you may remain, Cedric.”

“What?” Draco squawked, ignoring Pansy’s attempts to shush him. “If Diggory and that _dog_ get to stay, we ought to be allowed too!” he said.

Dumbledore looked down his long crooked nose at the angry boy. “I believe I have already expressed my wishes regarding your dispersal, Mr. Malfoy. If I must take house points to ensure your cooperation, I will do so. I will be back to see you as soon as I have met with Fudge, Harry,” said Dumbledore, turning away from Draco as though the matter was settled. “I would like you to remain here tomorrow until I have spoken to the school. Students—if you would come with me.”

“Come on,” Pansy muttered, tugging at Draco’s arm. “You’re going to get us all in trouble!”

“Who cares?” snapped Draco. “Slytherin just won the Triwizard Tournament, who cares if someone else gets the House Cup? I’m not leaving until I know what happened to Harry!” His pale eyes flashed and he raised his chin, readying for an argument, but Daphne grabbed his other arm and together the two girls dragged him out of the room.

Cedric and Fleur shook hands and separated, Cedric stalking to one of the beds near Krum, and Fleur tossing her long hair back over her shoulder and heading for the door. Fleur paused as she passed by Harry, leaned down, and kissed him on the cheek. “Congratulations,” she said, and swept out of the room in Dumbledore’s wake. Being kissed by her wasn’t quite as comforting as having Fawkes sit on his knee, but Harry still felt his heart lighten momentarily in the silvery glow of her presence.

“G’night,” Goyle told him, smiling guilelessly. “Good job winning the tournament!”

Crabbe grunted his agreement and plodded out the door beside his friend. Hermione and Ron fell into step behind the two burly boys, Hermione throwing one worried, white-faced glance over her shoulder at Harry before she crossed the threshold.

Professor Snape entered as they left, oddly deaf for once to Draco’s whining as they passed on the threshold. His glittering eyes fixed on Harry with a strange, almost haunted look that Harry had never seen on his Head of House’s sallow face before.

As Madam Pomfrey led Harry to a nearby bed, he caught sight of the real Moody lying motionless in a bed at the far end of the room. His wooden leg and magical eye were lying on the bedside table.

“Is he okay?” Harry asked.

“He’ll be fine,” said Madam Pomfrey, giving Harry some pajamas and pulling screens around him. He took off his robes, pulled on the pajamas, and got into bed. Professor Snape, Lupin, and the Color Charmed dog came around the screen and settled themselves on either side of Harry’s bed, Snape and Lupin on one of the chairs along each side and Sirius on the floor at Lupin’s feet.

Lupin was looking at Harry anxiously, as though trying to find some hidden sign of further injury.

“I’m all right,” he told him. “Just tired.”

Snape was hardly looking at Harry at all. “Potter,” he said reluctantly. “The headmaster has asked me to speak with you. I will keep my comments brief, as you are in need of rest—but I suppose Dumbledore thinks that you will find your slumber more peaceful if…if your mind can be set at ease, first.”

Sirius’s hackles raised and he started to growl, quietly, until Lupin nudged him sharply with his foot.

Professor Snape ignored both Lupin and the dog as though neither existed. His gaze traveled across the scar on Harry’s forehead and eventually fixed tightly on his green eyes. For a long moment he said nothing; when he spoke, his voice was low and rough. “So—the important thing to understand, Potter, is that loyalty takes many forms, and often cleaves to diverse sources. Conflict comes when two or more of those sources prove mutually exclusive, at which point a choice must be made.”

“What kind of choice—?” Harry began, but Snape shook his head sharply, cutting him off.

“It is not always…clear, at the time, what choice is the correct one. But it is important—vitally important—not to make the wrong one. Some choices, some sins, cannot…they cannot be forgiven. To that end it is, perhaps, the most important thing that one can do—as a friend—is encourage those who may be faced with such a choice to choose…carefully. Rash words, and rash acts, can lead toward paths from which there is no easy return. Better, I believe, to avoid making those mistakes in the first place.”

Professor Snape was, once again, clutching his left arm. His fingers were dug in so tightly that the sleeve of his robe dimpled. Harry was sure it had to hurt, but Snape didn’t seem to notice the pain.

“It is possible,” he said, in a voice so soft that Harry could barely hear him, “that a certain undeserved generosity toward one who may be, shall we say, somewhat torn between these various conflicts of loyalty…may inspire them to choose the path of wisdom rather than…foolish desperation.”

“Severus, I’m not sure that….” Lupin started to say quietly, but Snape acted as though he hadn’t heard.

“That is to say, it may be possible to save someone from themselves, even when they are not worth saving.” His black eyes flashed and his voice snapped back to its usual sharp, sour tones. “Of course, not everyone can be saved; certainly most people do not deserve it. No one could blame a person who took the sensible course of action and turned their back, letting any fools they knew make what mistakes they liked, and suffer the consequences accordingly. However…if you wish to retain the friendship of someone who finds themselves caught within such a regrettable conflict…you may have to make certain…allowances, on their behalf.” He shrugged and rose suddenly to his feet. “Or not—that choice is also yours. It is hard to say whether cutting such a person loose from one’s life would be of any real loss.”

Harry stared at him. “What do you mean—?” he began, but again Snape interrupted before he could finish his question.

“And with that, I must bid you goodnight, Mr. Potter. You have had a long day. It is time for you to rest.” He turned on his heel and swept out of the room without sparing so much as a glance at Lupin or the dog.

Madam Pomfrey, who had bustled off to her office, returned holding a small bottle of some purple potion and a goblet.

“You’ll need to drink all of this, Harry,” she said. “It’s a potion for dreamless sleep.”

Harry took the goblet and drank a few mouthfuls. He felt himself becoming drowsy at once. Everything around him became hazy; the lamps around the hospital wing seemed to be winking at him in a friendly way through the screen around his bed; his body felt as though it was sinking deeper into the warmth of the feather mattress. Before he could finish the potion, before he could say another word, his exhaustion carried him off to sleep.

 

Harry woke up, so warm, so very sleepy, that he didn’t open his eyes, wanting to drop off again. The room was still dimly lit; he was sure it was still nighttime and had a feeling that he couldn’t have been asleep very long.

Then he heard whispering around him.

“No, Padfoot, stay! If you go bark at them, you’ll wake Harry for sure….”

Harry opened his eyes blearily. Someone had removed his glasses. He could see the fuzzy outline of Professor Lupin close by. He was bent over in his chair, whispering to the dog which now stood at the foot of Harry’s bed, face pointed toward the hospital wing’s large double doors.

“If anything else has happened, we’ll know soon enough without you poking your nose out and risking being recognized…. That’s McGonagall, she won’t have let anything else go wrong….”

Now Harry could them too: people shouting and running toward the hospital wing.

“Regrettable, but all the same, Minerva—” Cornelius Fudge was saying loudly.

“You should never have brought it inside the castle!” yelled Professor McGonagall. “When Dumbledore finds out—”

Harry heard the hospital doors burst open. Unnoticed by either the man or the dog around his bed, both of whom were staring at the door as Lupin pulled back the screens, Harry sat up and put his glasses back on. Across the ward, Krum was sitting up in his bed as well and Cedric had risen to his feet, looking startled.

Fudge came striding up the ward. Professors McGonagall and Snape were at his heels.

“Where’s Dumbledore?” Fudge demanded of Lupin.

“Not here,” said Lupin, looking taken aback. “This is the hospital wing, Minister, please keep your voice down. I’m sure Dumbledore is in his office—”

But the door opened, and Dumbledore came sweeping up the ward.

“What has happened?” said Dumbledore sharply, looking from Fudge to Professor McGonagall. “Why are you disturbing these people? Minerva, I’m surprised at you—I asked you to stand guard over Barty Crouch—”

“There is no need to stand guard over him anymore, Dumbledore!” she shrieked. “The Minister has seen to that!”

Harry had never seen Professor McGonagall lose control like this. There were angry blotches of color in her cheeks, and her hands were balled into fists; she was trembling with fury.

“When we told Mr. Fudge that we had caught the Death Eater responsible for tonight’s events,” said Snape, in a low voice, “he seemed to feel his personal safety was in question. He insisted on summoning a dementor to accompany him into the castle. He brought it up to the office where Barty Crouch—”

“I told him you would not agree, Dumbledore!” Professor McGonagall fumed. “I reminded him of what you said last year, I told him you would never allow dementors to set foot inside the castle, but—”

“My dear woman!” roared Fudge, who likewise looked angrier than Harry had ever seen him, “as Minister of Magic, it is my decision whether I wish to bring protection with me when interviewing a possibly dangerous—”

But Professor McGonagall’s voice drowned Fudge’s.

“The moment that—that thing entered the room,” she screamed, pointing at Fudge, trembling all over, “it swooped down on Crouch and—and—”

Harry felt a chill in his stomach as Professor McGonagall struggled to find words to describe what had happened. He did not need her to finish her sentence. He knew what the dementor must have done. It had administered its fatal Kiss to Barty Crouch. It had sucked his soul out through his mouth. He was worse than dead.

“By all accounts, he is no loss!” blustered Fudge. “It seems he has been responsible for several deaths!”

“But he cannot now give testimony, Cornelius,” said Dumbledore. He was staring hard at Fudge, as though seeing him plainly for the first time. “He cannot give evidence about why he killed those people.”

“Why he killed them? Well, that’s no mystery, is it?” blustered Fudge. “He was a raving lunatic! From what Minerva and Severus have told me, he seems to have thought he was doing it all on You-Know-Who’s instructions!”

“Lord Voldemort _was_ giving him instructions, Cornelius,” Dumbledore said. “Those people’s deaths were mere by-products of a plan to restore Voldemort to full strength again. The plan succeeded. Voldemort has been restored to his body.”

Fudge looked as though someone had just swung a heavy weight into his face. Dazed and blinking, he stared back at Dumbledore as if he couldn’t quite believe what he had just heard. He began to sputter, still goggling at Dumbledore.

“You-Know-Who…returned? Preposterous. Come now, Dumbledore…”

“As Minerva and Severus have doubtless told you,” said Dumbledore, “we heard Barty Crouch confess. Under the influence of Veritaserum, he told us how he was smuggled out of Azkaban, and how Voldemort—learning of his continued existence from Bertha Jorkins—went to free him from his father and used him to capture Harry. The plan worked, I tell you. Crouch has helped Voldemort to return.”

“See here, Dumbledore,” said Fudge, and Harry was astonished to see a slight smile dawning on his face, “you—you can’t seriously believe that. You-Know-Who—back? Come now, come now…certainly, Crouch may have _believed_ himself to be acting upon You-Know-Who’s orders—but to take the word of a lunatic like that, Dumbledore…”

“When Harry touched the Triwizard Cup tonight, he was transported straight to Voldemort,” said Dumbledore steadily. “He witnessed Lord Voldemort’s rebirth. I will explain it all to you if you will step up to my office.”

Dumbledore glanced around at Harry and saw that he was awake, but shook his head and said, “I am afraid I cannot permit you to question Harry tonight.”

Fudge’s curious smile lingered. He too glanced at Harry, then looked back at Dumbledore, and said, “You are—er—prepared to take Harry’s word on this, are you, Dumbledore?”

There was a moment’s silence, which was broken by Sirius growling. His hackles, now beginning to darken at last, were raised, and he was baring his teeth at Fudge. Lupin had his hand on the back of his neck, and was trying to force the dog to sit down again, to keep out of sight, but everyone else seemed too preoccupied to pay attention to the dog they were calling Snuffles.

“Certainly, I believe Harry,” said Dumbledore. His eyes were blazing now. “I heard Crouch’s confession, and I heard Harry’s account of what happened after he touched the Triwizard Cup; the two stories make sense, they explain everything that has happened since Bertha Jorkins disappeared last summer.”

Fudge still had that strange smile on his face. Once again, he glanced at Harry before answering.

“You are prepared to believe that Lord Voldemort has returned, on the word of a lunatic murderer, and a boy who…well…”

Fudge shot Harry another look, and Harry suddenly understood. His heart sank; Draco had been right, although Harry was sure that even Draco could not have suspected that the damage done to Harry’s reputation would have consequences so quickly.

“You’ve been reading Rita Skeeter, Mr. Fudge,” he said quietly.

Lupin and Cedric jumped. Neither of them had realized that Harry was awake.

Fudge reddened slightly, but a defiant and obstinate look came over his face.

“And if I have?” he said, looking at Dumbledore. “If I have discovered that you’ve been keeping certain facts about the boy very quiet? A Parselmouth, eh? And having funny turns all over the place—”

“I assume that you are referring to the pains Harry has been experiencing in his scar?” said Dumbledore coolly.

“You admit that he has been having these pains, then?” said Fudge quickly. “Headaches? Nightmares? Possibly—hallucinations?”

“Listen to me, Cornelius,” said Dumbledore, taking a step toward Fudge, and once again, he seemed to radiate that indefinable sense of power that Harry had felt after Dumbledore had Stunned young Crouch. “Harry is as sane as you or I. That scar upon his forehead has not addled his brains. I believe it hurts him when Lord Voldemort is close by, or feeling particularly murderous.”

Fudge had taken half a step back from Dumbledore, but he looked no less stubborn.

“You’ll forgive me, Dumbledore, but I’ve never heard of a curse scar acting as an alarm bell before….”

“Look, I saw Voldemort come back!” Harry shouted. He tried to get out of bed again, but Lupin grabbed him with the hand not currently restraining Sirius, and forced him back. “I can tell you how he did it! There was this potion he used, he put my blood in it—and Wormtail, Peter Pettigrew, he cut off his own hand on Voldemort’s say-so—”

“Peter Pettigrew!” Fudge repeated angrily. “I have spent the last year dealing with your fixation on Peter Pettigrew, boy! I tell you, Pettigrew is dead! I was there myself, I saw what was left of him when your god-father had finished with him! Thanks to you I’ve had everyone from Kingsley Shacklebolt to Lucius Malfoy poking around a case that was settled more than a decade ago, when we’ve got more important things to be dealing with than some crackpot story of yours—” He turned back to Dumbledore. “His tales are getting taller, and you’re still swallowing them—the boy can talk to snakes, Dumbledore, and you still think he’s trustworthy?”

“Harry’s one of the most trustworthy people I’ve ever met, Minister,” Cedric shouted suddenly. “You ought to know Rita Skeeter’s full of it, my dad’s always talking about how much trouble she causes the Ministry. You know she lies, why are you so ready to believe her over Harry now? Just because he’s a Parselmouth? He can’t help how he was born!”

Fudge spun around to face Cedric. “I don’t think your father would like you taking that tone with me!” he snapped, affronted.

“My dad would want me to stick-up for my friends,” Cedric said mulishly, and Harry felt a sharp flash of guilt for every jealous, ungenerous thought he had ever had about the Hufflepuff boy.

“You want to be careful whose side you put yourself on, Diggory!” Fudge blustered. “Might end up doing yourself some real damage down the line, if you aren’t a bit more choosy—”

“You fool!” Professor McGonagall cried. “What about Bartemius Crouch? Bertha Jorkins? These deaths were not the random work of a lunatic!”

“I see no evidence to the contrary!” shouted Fudge, spinning back around, now matching her anger, his face purpling. “It seems to me that you are all determined to start a panic that will destabilize everything we have worked for these last thirteen years!”

Harry couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He had always thought of Fudge as a kindly figure, a little blustering, a little pompous, but essentially good-natured. But now a short, angry wizard stood before him, refusing, point-blank, to accept the prospect of disruption in his comfortable and ordered world—to believe that Voldemort could have risen.

“Voldemort has returned,” Dumbledore repeated. “If you accept that fact straightaway, Fudge, and take the necessary measures, we may still be able to save the situation. The first and most essential step is to remove Azkaban from the control of the dementors—”

“Preposterous!” shouted Fudge again. “Remove the dementors? I’d be kicked out of office for suggesting it! Half of us only feel safe in our beds at night because we know the dementors are standing guard at Azkaban!”

“The rest of us sleep less soundly in our beds, Cornelius, knowing that you have put Lord Voldemort’s most dangerous supporters in the care of creatures who will join him the instant he asks them!” said Dumbledore. “They will not remain loyal to you, Fudge! Voldemort can offer them much more scope for their powers and their pleasures than you can! With the dementors behind him, and his old supporters returned to him, you will be hard-pressed to stop him regaining the sort of power he had thirteen years ago!”

Fudge was opening and closing his mouth as though no words could express his outrage.

“The second step you must take—and at once,” Dumbledore pressed on, “is to send envoys to the giants.”

“Envoys to the giants?” Fudge shrieked, finding his tongue again, and Harry could tell at once that Dumbledore had gone too far; if there had been any hope of convincing Fudge to see sense, he had thrown it away by bringing up the subject of giants, whom so many wizards hated. “What madness is this?”

“Extend them the hand of friendship, now, before it is too late,” said Dumbledore, “or Voldemort will persuade them, as he did before, that he alone among wizards will give them their rights and their freedom!”

“You—you cannot be serious!” Fudge gasped, shaking his head and retreating further from Dumbledore. “If the magical community got wind that I had approached the giants—people hate them, Dumbledore—end of my career—”

“You are blinded,” said Dumbledore, his voice rising now, the aura of power around him palpable, his eyes blazing once more, “by the love of the office you hold, Cornelius! You place too much importance, and you always have done, on the so-called purity of blood! You fail to recognize that it matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be! Your dementor has just destroyed the last remaining member of a pure-blood family as old as any—and see what that man chose to make of his life! I tell you now—take the steps I have suggested, and you will be remembered, in office or out, as one of the bravest and greatest Ministers of Magic we have ever known. Fail to act—and history will remember you as the man who stepped aside and allowed Voldemort a second chance to destroy the world we have tried to rebuild!”

“Insane,” whispered Fudge, still backing away. “Mad…”

And then there was silence. Madam Pomfrey was standing frozen at the foot of Harry’s bed, her hands over her mouth. Lupin was still half-crouched at his chair, one hand on Harry’s shoulder to prevent him from rising and the other clutching Sirius by the scruff of his neck. Cedric had drifted closer, as though seeking comfort from their proximity, and his tan face was ashen as he stared at Fudge.

“If your determination to shut your eyes will carry you as far as this, Cornelius,” said Dumbledore, “we have reached a parting of the ways. You must act as you see fit. And I—I shall act as I see fit.”

Dumbledore’s voice carried no hint of a threat; it sounded like a mere statement, but Fudge bristled as though Dumbledore were advancing upon him with a wand.

“Now, see here, Dumbledore,” he said, waving a threatening finger. “I’ve given you free rein, always. I’ve had a lot of respect for you. I might not have agreed with some of your decisions, but I’ve kept quiet. There aren’t many who’d have let you hire werewolves” (Lupin’s hand tightened on Harry’s shoulder) “or keep Hagrid, or decide what to teach your students without reference to the Ministry. But if you’re going to work against me—”

“The only one against whom I intend to work,” said Dumbledore, “is Lord Voldemort. If you are against him, then we remain, Cornelius, on the same side.”

It seemed Fudge could think of no answer to this. He rocked backward and forward on his small feet for a moment and spun his bowler hat in his hands. Finally, he said, with a hint of a plea in his voice, “He can’t be back, Dumbledore, he just can’t be…”

Professor Snape strode forward, past Dumbledore, pulling up the left sleeve of his robes as he went. He stuck out his forearm and showed it to Fudge, who recoiled.

“There,” said Snape harshly. “There. The Dark Mark. It is not as clear as it was an hour or so ago, when it burned black, but you can still see it. Every Death Eater had the sign burned into him by the Dark Lord. It was a means of distinguishing one another, and his means of summoning us to him. When he touched the Mark of any Death Eater, we were to Disapparate, and Apparate, instantly, at his side. This Mark has been growing clearer all year. Karkaroff’s too. Why do you think Karkaroff fled tonight? We both felt the Mark burn. We both knew he had returned. Karkaroff fears the Dark Lord’s vengeance. He betrayed too many of his fellow Death Eaters to be sure of a welcome back into the fold.”

Fudge stepped back from Snape too. He was shaking his head. He did not seem to have taken in a word Snape had said. He stared, apparently repelled by the ugly mark on Snape’s arm, then looked up at Dumbledore and whispered, “I don’t know what you and your staff are playing at, Dumbledore, but I have heard enough. I have no more to add. I will be in touch with you tomorrow, Dumbledore, to discuss the running of this school. I must return to the Ministry.”

“If he has not come back,” Krum said, his hoarse voice rising suddenly from where he was sitting, startling everyone, “then vhy has Professor Karkaroff run? You do not think he vuold disappear only because his champion has been losing the Triwizard Tournament? That is a reason to anger, not flight.”

Fudge stared at Krum. After a moment he said curtly, “I’m sure I don’t know why Igor Karkaroff does anything he does. Excuse me.”

He had almost reached the door when he paused. He turned around, strode back down the dormitory, and stopped at Harry’s bed.

“Your winnings,” he said shortly, taking a large bag of gold out of his pocket and dropping it onto Harry’s bedside table. “One thousand Galleons. There should have been a presentation ceremony, but under the circumstances…”

“That isn’t right,” Cedric said suddenly. “Harry won the tournament fair and square. You can’t skip the victory ceremony just because you’re angry at your victor all of a sudden.”

Fudge glowered at Cedric. “You’re going to want to be careful, Mr. Diggory,” he said. “I suggest you talk things over with your father before you do anything rash. You’ve only one year left in this place, and you’re going to want to make sure you don’t burn any bridges you’ll regret when you leave. There’s a big wide world outside these castle walls, and out there you’ll find plenty of people who outrank a mere schoolmaster!”

He crammed his bowler hat onto his head and walked out of the room, slamming the door behind him. The moment he had disappeared, Dumbledore turned to look at the group around Harry’s bed.

“There is work to be done,” he said. “Remus…I assume that I can count on you once more?”

“Always, Albus,” said Lupin quickly, standing and removing the restraining grip he had been keeping on both Harry and Sirius.

“Good,” said Dumbledore. “And—Cedric?”

Cedric stepped over beside Lupin and the dog. “I’m your man, Dumbledore,” he said. “If You-Know-Who is back—well, I know which side I ought to be on.”

Dumbledore smiled at him. “Thank you, Cedric. And what of your parents?”

“They will be too, sir. Dad’s loyalty to the Ministry isn’t going to blind him to what’s really going on. He’d have turned on Fudge too in an instant, if he’d been here to hear this. And mum’d never let him hear the end of it, if he didn’t.”

Dumbledore nodded. “Then I need you to get a message to your parents at once,” he said. “If you think your father will indeed be willing to help us once the situation is explained to him—”

“Without a doubt, sir,” said Cedric. “Dad hates the Dark Side, that’s one of the reasons why he went to work for the Ministry in the first place, to keep things safe for people.”

“Then we need his help,” said Dumbledore. “All those that we can persuade of the truth must be notified immediately, and he is well-placed to contact those at the Ministry who are not as shortsighted as Cornelius.”

“I’ll go write him right now,” said Cedric. “Right away.”

“Excellent,” said Dumbledore. “Tell him what has happened. Tell him I will be in direct contact with him shortly. He will need to be discreet, however. If Fudge thinks I am interfering at the Ministry—”

“Understood, headmaster,” said Cedric. He exchanged a sharp glance with Harry, then strode quickly from the room.

“Viktor,” said Dumbledore, turning to the other former Triwizard champion, “I appreciate you being willing to speak-up against your headmaster on our behalf.”

Krum shrugged. “He is not always being a very good headmaster anyway, sir,” he muttered.

Dumbledore didn’t take the bait to begin insulting Karkaroff, but instead said, “If I might prevail upon you to do yet still more—?”

Krum looked up from the floor for the first time, meeting Dumbledore’s eyes. His sallow face was sickly and there were deep circles under his eyes. “You say it vas vone of these Death Eaters who attacked me in the maze tonight? Who made me—made me do things I haff no vanting for doing? Yes, I vill do votever you need against these people.”

“Thank you,” said Dumbledore. “For the moment, what I need from you is for you to return to your fellow Durmstrang students and explain to them what has happened—why their headmaster left, who he was running from, and your decision to make a stand against Lord Voldemort. Do not pressure anyone else to declare an allegiance if they do not wish to, but watch and listen—make note of who feels similar to you, and who objects. The day when we will need every ally we can muster will soon be upon us.”

Krum threw off his blankets and rose to his feet, nodding grimly. “I vill do as you ask, Professor Dumbledore,” he said. He walked out of the room without looking at anyone else.

“Minerva,” said Dumbledore, turning to Professor McGonagall, “I want to see Hagrid in my office as soon as possible. Also—if she will consent to come—Madame Maxime.”

Professor McGonagall nodded and left without a word.

“Poppy,” Dumbledore said to Madam Pomfrey, “would you be very kind and go down to Professor Moody’s office, where I think you will find a house-elf called Winky in considerable distress? Do what you can for her, and take her back to the kitchens. Ask one of the other elves there to look after her for us.”

“Very—very well,” said Madam Pomfrey, looking startled, and she too left.

Dumbledore made sure that the door was closed, and that Madam Pomfrey’s footsteps had died away, before he spoke again.

“And now,” he said, “it is time for two of our number to recognize each other for what they are. Sirius…if you could resume your usual form.”

The great gold-brown dog looked up at Dumbledore, then, in an instant, turned back into a man.

Harry heard a sudden, sharp hiss of indrawn breath, and turned to look at Professor Snape. The look on his face was one of mingled fury and horror. He seemed to have no trouble recognizing Sirius, despite his discolored hair.

“Him!” Snape snarled, staring at Sirius, whose face showed equal dislike. “What is he doing here?”

“He is here at my invitation,” said Dumbledore, looking between them, “as are you, Severus. I trust you both. It is time for you to lay aside your old differences and trust each other.”

Harry thought Dumbledore was asking for a near miracle. Sirius and Snape were eyeing each other with the utmost loathing. Lupin’s eyes darted nervously back and forth between the two men.

“I will settle, in the short term,” said Dumbledore, with a bite of impatience in his voice, “for a lack of open hostility. You will shake hands. You are on the same side now. Time is short, and unless the few of us who know the truth stand united, there is no hope for any of us.”

Very slowly—but still glaring at each other as though each wished the other nothing but ill—Sirius and Snape moved toward each other and shook hands. They let go extremely quickly.

“That will do to be going on with,” said Dumbledore, stepping between them once more. His gaze took in Lupin as well. “Now I have work for all three of you. Fudge’s attitude, though not unexpected, changes everything. Sirius, Remus, I need you to both set off at once. You are to alert Emmeline Vance, Arabella Figg, Mundungus Fletcher—the old crowd. Go to Remus’s when you are done and lie low there for a while; I will contact you there.”

“But—” said Harry.

He wanted Sirius to stay. He did not want to have to say good-bye again so quickly.

“You’ll see me very soon, Harry,” said Sirius, turning to him. “I promise you. But I must do what I can, you understand, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” said Harry. “Yeah…of course I do.”

“I’ll do my best to keep him out of trouble,” Lupin promised, smiling reassuringly.

Harry forced himself to smile back. “Thanks,” he said. “You be careful, too.”

“We both will,” Lupin promised him.

Sirius grasped Harry’s hand briefly, nodded to Dumbledore, transformed again into the nearly-black dog, and ran the length of the room to the door, where he waited for Lupin to catch up and turn the handle. Then they were gone.

“Severus,” said Dumbledore, turning to Snape, “you know what I must ask you to do. If you are ready…if you are prepared…”

“I am,” said Snape.

He looked slightly paler than usual, and his cold, black eyes glittered strangely.

“Then good luck,” said Dumbledore, and he watched, with a trace of apprehension on his face, as Snape swept wordlessly after Sirius and Remus.

It was several minutes before Dumbledore spoke again.

“I must go, Harry; there are things that I must see to. But I do not want you here alone tonight,” Dumbledore said softly. “With your permission, I will send for one of your friends—Miss Granger, perhaps?—to stay with you, just in case you should need anything.”

Harry felt very small and alone. He nodded. “All right,” he said.

“I do not want you sitting up half the night talking to her, however,” Dumbledore cautioned. “Tell her only the bare minimum that you feel you must, and then drink the rest of your potion and get some sleep. I promise, we will speak more later.”

“Okay,” Harry said. He slumped back against his pillows as Dumbledore disappeared. He sat there, motionlessly, his brain whirling, until the doors opened again and Hermione burst in. She was wearing a blue dressing gown over her pajamas and she looked both sleepy and fearful. Her bushy hair was more disheveled than Harry had ever seen it.

“Harry!” she cried. “Harry, Dumbledore’s just told me—You-Know-Who is back? Really back?”

Harry nodded dully, not lifting his head from his pillows. “Yeah,” he said. “I saw it. That’s where I went—where the Cup took me after I grabbed it. That’s why it took so long for me to come out of the maze.”

Hermione’s eyes were enormous. “We—we all thought something must be wrong, when Cedric came out saying that you’d taken the Cup, and there was no sign of you for so long…but—but _that?”_ She shook her head and walked slowly to the side of Harry’s bed.

“Are you…are you all right?” she asked him in a small voice. “I’m sorry—Professor Dumbledore said I wasn’t to ask you any questions, he said you need to sleep, but—”

“No,” said Harry tonelessly, “it’s okay. Anyone’d be curious….”

Hermione was watching him with a curious frown. “Harry, why…can I just ask…?”

“Yeah?”

“Well…why did…why do you think Professor Dumbledore sent for _me?”_

Her face went pink when he looked up at her.

“I just mean—well, not that I mind, of course I don’t, but—but wouldn’t someone else have been a better choice? A more obvious choice, I mean? Draco, for instance…?”

Harry closed his eyes. He didn’t want to talk about Draco right now. “No,” he said shortly.

“Oh,” said Hermione, her voice barely a squeak. “Okay,” she said.

Harry heard her footsteps moving away and he opened his eyes again, to apologize, to ask her to stay—but she had only gone to the window, where she stared out across the dark grounds. Harry wondered if she could see Krum returning to the Durmstrang ship, to tell his classmates that Voldemort was back and to see who would greet that news with a cheer. He wondered if she could see Sirius and Remus leaving, or if they were already gone. He wondered where Dumbledore had sent Professor Snape, and if Hermione could spot any sign of him.

As Harry lay there in silence, staring up at the ceiling, the full weight of everything he had seen that night seemed to fall in upon him. His mother’s face, his father’s voice, the sight of Mr. Malfoy turning away from him, all started spinning in his head until he could hardly bear it, until he was screwing up his face against the howl of misery fighting to get out of him.

There was a loud slamming noise, and Harry opened his eyes again. Hermione was still standing by the window. She was holding something tight in her hand.

“Sorry,” she whispered.

“It’s fine,” Harry croaked hoarsely.

“You should drink your potion,” Hermione told him. “Professor Dumbledore said it was important.”

Harry drank it in one gulp. The effect was instantaneous. Heavy, irresistible waves of dreamless sleep broke over him; he fell back onto his pillows and thought no more.

 


	34. Rumors and Reputations

Harry could not bring himself to go down to the Great Hall for breakfast the next day, even though he knew that Dumbledore was going to make an announcement to the school explaining what had happened the night before. He couldn’t face the idea of so many people staring at him; couldn’t face the idea of talking to his friends. He was happy to allow Madam Pomfrey to fuss over him when he woke, and to eat the breakfast she had sent up for him from the kitchens. After breakfast, though, he had to face the truth: he couldn’t hide in here forever.

He had barely finished dressing in the clean robes Madam Pomfrey had laid out for him when the doors opened and Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle bust inside. “Harry, what—?”

“Not here,” Harry interrupted shortly. He led the way out of the hospital wing and they followed obediently all the way down to the entrance hall and out onto the grounds. Harry paused halfway down the lawn, staring blindly in the direction of the Quidditch pitch. He wondered if the maze was still there, or if it—and the monsters that had been placed inside it—had already been magicked away, leaving no trace that they had ever been….

They walked toward the lake, stopping far from the point where the Durmstrang ship still bobbed at anchor. Harry squinted at its furled black sails, its gleaming brightwork; he wondered what Viktor Krum had said to the other students last night, and what they had said to him….

“Well?” Draco asked impatiently.

Harry turned his back on the Durmstrang ship to face his friends. “What did Dumbledore say?” he asked. His stomach churned and he wished that he had skipped Madam Pomfrey’s breakfast.

“Not much,” Draco said in a disgruntled voice. “He told us that, yes, you had won the tournament, but that the celebrations planned for afterward had been canceled because of ‘extenuating circumstances’ and ‘the wishes of the Ministry of Magic.’ He said he’d tell us more when he had more to tell. But Harry—what _happened?”_

Harry stared at his friends. He couldn’t believe it—had Dumbledore really not told anyone?

“He—he didn’t say anything about…?” Harry couldn’t bring himself to say it.

“About what?” Draco said.

Harry couldn’t think of anything to say. He turned and ran, blindly, around the circumference of the lake. He could hear the others shouting after him in surprise, but he didn’t stop. He had no destination in mind; he just needed to run, to leave, to be somewhere—anywhere—other than standing there with his friends, seeing the confusion and concern in their eyes. They didn’t know that Voldemort was back…they didn’t know that Harry had seen the Death Eaters, had seen their own fathers, ringed in a masked circle around him in the graveyard….

They didn’t know that Harry knew their secret now.

He didn’t stop running until he tripped over his own untied shoelace and went sprawling in the mud along the shore of the lake. He landed with his hands several inches deep in water and came up, sputtering, brushing wet hair out of his face. His glasses were covered in mud and water, and he sat down on the edge of the lake to clean them.

“You all right?”

Harry looked up at the sound of a familiar voice.

Neville Longbottom, his robes hitched up around his thighs, was standing knee-deep in the lake, his hands full of rubbery green tubes. There was a smear of dirt across his nose and a concerned frown on his round face.

“Fine,” Harry said quickly, jamming his glasses back onto his nose. “I didn’t realize anyone else was out here.”

“Oh, I came out to look for Trevor,” Longbottom said. “My toad, you remember? He’s always hopping off somewhere, but he usually turns up down here, I think he really likes the lake….”

“And, er—those?” Harry asked, nodding at the wriggly plants Longbottom was holding.

“Jobberknoll grass,” said Longbottom brightly. “Professor Sprout mentioned after our exams that she was going to have to come and clear some of it out, it gets really thick in July if you don’t prune it I guess, and then the grindylows can steal too many eggs, and….”

Neville trailed-off mid-sentence, perhaps realizing that Harry wasn’t really listening.

“Anyway, er, I guess if you’re all right, I’ll just get back to what I was doing…?”

“What do you do?” Harry asked, more of the plants than of Neville. “What do you do, when you realize someone you care about doesn’t care about you? When you realize you don’t even really know them?”

Several sharp splashes were Neville dropping the Jobberknoll grass back into the lake. “What’s that?” he said.

“What’s that feel like? Looking at someone who means something to you and realizing you don’t know them at all? That they’re a stranger looking back at you out of a familiar face?” Harry said softly, staring out across the gleaming surface of the lake. Ripples quivered at various spots as things came up to nibble at the surface from below, or landed gently on it from above, but the lake itself was still in the heavy summer air. There was no sign of the giant squid; no sign of the flourishing society of merpeople beneath its surface; no sign of the windows to the Slytherin common room, hidden far below.

“I…I guess that would be pretty horrible,” Neville said, in a strangled sort of voice.

Harry nodded absently. “Yeah,” he said. “But the question is, what do you say when you finally figure it out, and the other person doesn’t know you know yet?”

“I guess…I guess you should tell them,” Neville suggested, tentatively wading closer. “Tell them that you know, I mean—and that either it doesn’t matter to you, or…or that it does.”

Harry looked at Neville properly for the first time. “How can it not matter?” he said.

Neville shrugged. “I guess it depends on how much you care about them,” he said simply. “Oh, Potter, quick—by your left shoe, that’s Trevor! Grab him for me, would you?”

The fat brown toad made a desperate leap for freedom but Harry, with reflexes born from long hours of Seeker training, grabbed him easily around the middle. “Here you go,” he said, holding the toad out to Neville, who took him with a grin.

“Thanks!” he said. “I guess I’d better get him upstairs before he runs off again…you going to be okay, Potter?”

“Sure,” Harry lied, nodding. “I’m fine.”

“Okay!” said Neville. “Oh—congratulations on winning the tournament, by the way!”

Harry nodded vaguely and watched Longbottom run back up to the castle, robes flapping around his chubby white legs, his squirming toad held tightly in both hands. For several minutes Harry just sat there on the muddy bank, enjoying the feeling of bright morning sun on his skin, but he knew he would eventually have to go back inside. He was in no hurry to resume his conversation with his friends, but the mud on his hands was starting to itch as it dried. Harry brushed the muck off as best he could, then paused and looked at his robes. They were filthy.

He sighed, climbed to his feet, and walked back to the castle to clean up and change.

He was stopped by someone shouting his name. “Oh, Harry—Harry!”

Harry turned and saw Cho hurrying up to him, several of her giggly friends following her. None of them were smiling today.

“What is it?” Harry asked, for once feeling too low to care that Cho was seeing him look a mess.

“What Cedric said—about You-Know-Who coming back?” Cho’s face was ashen and her voice was unnaturally high. “He said…he said you saw him?”

“Er—yeah,” said Harry. “That’s where the Cup took me after the maze.”

“Oh,” said Cho. Her eyes were very large. “What—what do we do now?” she asked him.

Harry shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said.

That didn’t seem to be the answer that anyone wanted to hear. Cho’s face fell and her friends drew in closer together, some of them looking over their shoulders nervously. The others were looking at Harry through narrow, suspicious eyes, and his heart gave another little lurch. Here was yet more evidence of the damage that Rita Skeeter’s poisonous pen had caused.

“Excuse me,” Harry said shortly. “I have to go wash up.”

“Oh—oh, right.” Cho looked, somehow, very alone, even though she was surrounded by her friends. “Well, I’ll…I’ll see you later, then, Harry?” she said.

“Yeah,” Harry said, “later. Sure.”

He thought about Cedric’s promise to Dumbledore, about how sure he had been that his parents would side with them against both Voldemort and the Ministry. Harry wondered if he had heard back from them yet. Neither of Cedric’s parents had seemed particularly pleased with Harry, Mr. Diggory least of all, but he had been cross about the articles that Rita Skeeter had been writing for the _Daily Prophet_ too…would he believe that Harry was telling the truth about Lord Voldemort coming back? Or would he think this was just another bid to get into the spotlight?

For the third time that morning, Harry was hailed by someone shouting his name.

“Oi, Harry! Harry Potter! Is it true?”

Pansy Parkinson and Daphne Greengrass, both fourth years in Slytherin like him, came running towards him down the entrance hall steps. Pansy’s eyes were glittering, but Daphne looked nervous.

“That I won the tournament?” Harry said. “Yeah, of course it is. The Ministry just doesn’t want—”

“Not that,” Pansy interrupted, shaking her head. “About the—you know—about the Dark Lord coming back. There’s some Gryffindor third year going around, telling people that you saw You-Know-Who return?” Pansy wrinkled her short nose, looking disdainful; she obviously expected Harry to scoff, to tell her not to listen to crazy rumors….

“Yes,” Harry said flatly. “He’s back. I saw it.”

He brushed past them, ignoring their frantic gasps, and stalked into the castle.

Harry knew one thing for sure: now that Pansy Parkinson had the story, it would be all over the castle by dinner. He was going to go get his dad’s old cloak out and find somewhere quiet to sit for awhile, alone.

He told himself that he wasn’t hiding from his friends—just waiting.

But waiting for _what_ , he didn’t know.

 

Harry had underestimated Pansy: by the time he walked into the Great Hall for lunch, everyone was talking about Lord Voldemort’s return. Harry skulked along the edges of the room, choosing a seat at the Slytherin table far away from everyone else. He had waited until the end of the meal, when most everyone else had already left; he caught sight of Crabbe and Goyle eating together at the far end of the table, but Draco wasn’t with them, and they were both too absorbed in their food to notice Harry’s arrival.

He bent his head over his plate and shoveled food into his mouth, trying not to overhear the hushed conversations going on around him.

“Do you think he’s telling the truth?”

“Who would be mental enough to make something like that up!?”

“Okay, but if You-Know-Who were really back, wouldn’t everyone _know?”_

“I bet he’s just doing it for the attention….”

“Really? Because winning the Triwizard Tournament isn’t _enough_ attention for one person?”

“I don’t care if You-Know-Who _is_ back, we still should have gotten to celebrate! If it had been a Gryffindor who’d won, what do you want to bet Dumbledore would have pulled a whole victory ball out of his sleeves, Dark Lord or no Dark Lord?”

“Well, we do have our dress robes already….”

“But if the Dark Lord is back…is it really a good time for celebrating things?”

“Why not? You don’t see You-Know-Who _here_ , do you?”

“Diggory says he’s telling the truth.”

“Well, Diggory has no way of knowing either, does he? Was _he_ there? No, he’s just parroting Potter….”

“You don’t think Dumbledore would just make something like this up, though—do you?”

“I dunno, the Minister seems to think he’s full of it….”

“And you know what the _Daily Prophet_ wrote about Potter….”

Harry shoved his plate away, his lunch half-eaten, and stood up from the table. He was suddenly no longer hungry. Still keeping his head down, trying not to catch anyone’s eye, Harry stomped out of the Great Hall. He almost tripped over a short, third year girl who stepped in front of him at the door.

“It’s true, isn’t it.”

Harry looked down into the fierce brown eyes of Ginny Weasley. She was exceptionally pale beneath her freckles and her eyes were red-rimmed, as though she had been crying, but her face was dry and her gaze was steady.

“He’s back,” she said.

Harry nodded. “Yes,” he said.

“Okay,” said Ginny matter-of-factly. “What do we do now?”

Harry frowned at her. “What makes you think I know?”

Ginny shrugged. “Didn’t you spend half the night talking to Dumbledore? Hermione said you did. I just figured he would have told you something.”

“Oh,” said Harry. “Well, he didn’t. He gave everybody else things to do, but he just told me to get some sleep.” Resentment started to kindle in Harry’s chest. He _had_ been tired, true, but he had also been the one to see Voldemort come back; the one to fight him. Shouldn’t he have been told _something_ useful?

“Maybe he didn’t want to over-tax you too soon,” Ginny suggested, as they fell into step beside one another. “You fought him, right?”

Harry nodded again. “Yeah,” he said. And then somehow, the next thing he knew, he was pouring out the whole terrifying ordeal to Ginny Weasley as they walked across the lawn in the direction of the Forbidden Forest. He didn’t know why—maybe it was because she was the only one who had looked at him with neither fear nor confusion in her eyes. Somehow the idea of telling her what had happened didn’t make Harry’s insides squirm. He reminded himself that Ginny Weasley probably knew Voldemort better than anyone else at Hogwarts, maybe even Dumbledore.

“…and I haven’t been able to talk to them yet,” Harry finished, nearly an hour later. “I don’t how what to say, how to tell them….”

“Well you’d better tell them something,” Ginny said. “Either they don’t know their dads are Death Eaters, in which case you ought to warn them before they go home, or they _do_ know…and if that’s the case, then _you_ need to know whose side they’re on before you start telling them anything else.”

Harry gave a start; that hadn’t occurred to him. He had been so wrapped-up in his feelings of betrayal at being lied to that he hadn’t realized that it was possible that his friends might be able to betray him _again_.

“Did Dumbledore say anything about whether or not he wants you going back to the dungeon tonight?” Ginny asked.

Harry shook his head. “I haven’t seen Dumbledore all morning,” he said.

“Well, you’d better figure things out on your own, then,” Ginny said, “and fast. If the people you share a bedroom with are on You-Know-Who’s side….”

She let the sentence trail off. Harry nodded. “Right,” he said, “good point. Thanks, Ginny.”

She shrugged again, her long hair moving like phoenix-fire across her shoulders. “You saved me from him once,” she said matter-of-factly, “it only seems fair if I try and return the favor. And Harry—I _do_ want to return the favor.” Ginny turned to face him head-on, her brown eyes blazing. “If there’s going to be fighting—if there’s going to be anything going on that’s working against You-Know-Who—I want to be part of it. I have to be.”

Harry nodded slowly. “I’ll tell you about it,” he said, “just as soon as anyone tells me. I promise.”

They shook hands, Harry feeling oddly formal, as though they were making an official pact.

“Thanks,” said Ginny grimly. “I owe _him_ something, too, you know.”

 

When Harry walked into his common room that evening after a late, lonely dinner, he was greeted like a champion. The whole room broke into applause, several people started chanting his name, and dozens of people hurried forward to shake his hand, clap him on the shoulder, or otherwise congratulate him on winning the Triwizard Tournament. Harry was caught so off-balance that he stumbled through the archway and nearly fell.

“Knew Diggory didn’t stand a chance against a Slytherin!” Bletchely crowed.

“Do you think they’ll let us keep the Cup in our common room?” asked Astoria Greengrass, bouncing with excitement.

“Did you see the look on Krum’s face when they woke him up after they dragged him out of the maze?” said Montague breathlessly. “He looked like he’d been run over by a Manticore! So much for International Quidditch fame!”

“And that Fleur Delacour!” Pansy said with relish. “Potter sure showed her a thing or two!”

“Go on, Potter—tell us how you did it!”

Harry didn’t mind reliving his journey through the maze for his housemates; it gave him an excuse to put-off confronting his friends. Having the entire common room gasping and applauding for him didn’t hurt, either. He took his time, drawing the story out, reliving every hex and narrow escape right up to his defeat of the last giant spider.

“Yeah,” Harry said, “and I thought for sure I’d lost—there was no way I could outrun Cedric, after what the spider had done to my leg—”

“Did you have to duel him, or did you manage to hex him when his back was turned?”

“Eugh, I can’t believe you saved him from that spider! Thought you’d learned your lesson after the second task….”

“What spell did you use on him?”

“I didn’t,” Harry said quickly. “Cedric—he changed his mind. Didn’t go for the Cup at all.”

“What? Why not? Did some other monster—?”

Harry shook his head. “No, he said that—well, that since I’d saved him twice, I deserved to take it.”

The entire room fell silent, everybody staring at Harry.

“Are you serious?” someone asked. Someone else started to giggle.

“You’re making that up—be honest, you hexed him!”

“Maybe he used an Unforgivable! That’s why he doesn’t want to tell anybody!”

“Yeah, Potter—did you Imperius him?”

“No!” Harry scowled. “No, I didn’t hex him, and I didn’t use any Unforgivable spells. Cedric just—just stepped back, let me take the Cup.”

He caught sight of Draco sitting among the crowd. He was grinning like everyone else, but it looked more strained than smug. Harry’s stomach turned over.

Everyone else was still talking about Cedric.

“I can’t believe it….”

“It’s true what they say about Hufflepuffs, isn’t it?”

“What a moron!”

“What a twit!”

“I think it’s sweet…”

“Sweet for Potter, you mean!”

“Well—way to go, Potter!”

Harry nodded and smiled, but inside his guts were coiling in cold ropes of nausea. He had been able to forget, while basking in the warm glow of his housemates’ praise, what had happened after he had taken the Cup—to forget where the maze had led him. Now the memories swam back up before his eyes, crisp and painful.

“Yeah….” he said.

“Well, what happened after that?” Millicent asked.

“Yeah, Potter, it was ages after they fished Diggory out of the maze before you turned up. Everyone was starting to worry that something had gone wrong with the Cup, it was supposed to bring you straight out.”

“Is it…is it true what they’re saying?” Tracey Davis glanced nervously over her shoulder at Pansy Parkinson, who was watching Harry with a sharp glint in her eyes. “Is it true that you…that you saw…?”

“Voldemort?” said Harry.

The entire room gasped. A first year shrieked. Astoria Greengrass fell off the arm of the couch she had been sitting on. Several people swore, foully.

“Yeah,” Harry said ruthlessly, “it’s true. He’s back. I saw it.”

The silence that followed his words rang like a bell.

When the noise started up again it was soft, hesitant; people talking in whispers, glancing over their shoulders, edging away from Harry, exchanging worried glances with their friends, muttering….

“…just making it up…”

“…impossible, can’t really be true…”

“…sick idea of a joke…”

“…think they’d close the school, if…”

“…ought to be enough glory for anyone without…”

And over and over, weaving among the doubt and dismissals, one question repeated:

“But what if it’s true?”

“What if he’s telling the truth?”

“What do we do if he’s really back…?”

“He’s back,” Harry said flatly. “That was the plan all along. That’s why Professor Moody entered my name in the Goblet of Fire.”

That pronouncement brought a sudden, ringing silence to the dungeon room. Every eye turned back to Harry.

“What?” Daphne said.

“ _Moody_ put your name in?” Draco exclaimed, his jaw falling open.

“He wasn’t actually Mad-Eye Moody, though,” Harry went on roughly. “He was someone named Barty Crouch—not the bloke who was in charge of the tournament who vanished, his son—and he was a Death Eater, and he was using polyjuice potion all year to impersonate Moody.”

A low buzz of disbelief met his words.

“No way!” someone cried.

“Impossible!” said someone else.

A few people started to laugh.

“Now I know he’s having us on!” Montague chortled.

“Yeah, come on Potter, hasn’t anyone ever taught you how to lie?”

“Or to quit when you’re ahead!”

“I’m not lying,” Harry said sharply. “Dumbledore was there, he saw it—and so did Snape.”

Professor Snape’s name had an instant effect on the room. Almost everyone stopped laughing and several people exchanged anxious glances with their neighbors. If Harry was willing to drag Snape’s name into things….

“Moody—or Crouch, actually—he put my name in the Goblet of Fire because he wanted me to win the tournament so he could send me to Voldemort.” Harry took a savage pleasure in watching everyone flinch when he said the name again. “That’s why Crouch came to Hogwarts in the first place, that was Voldemort’s plan all along.”

“So—you mean you really _didn’t_ put your name in the Goblet of Fire?”

Harry met Draco’s eyes across the room. They were wide and pale and his face was bloodless, but he didn’t flinch away from meeting Harry’s gaze, and Harry realized— _Draco didn’t know_.

Oh, he knew that Voldemort was back; if he had thought Harry was lying, he would have spoken-up by now, scoffing and sneering and explaining why Harry had made such a ridiculous mistake. No, the pallor on his pointed face could only be explained if he believed that Harry was telling the truth. But he didn’t yet know that when Voldemort had returned, his father had been there in the graveyard too, watching.

Harry scowled. “No,” he said shortly, “of course I didn’t put my name in. Did you really think I did, all this time?”

Draco shrugged. “Well…yeah, of course,” he said, to the accompaniment of several nervous chuckles. “Everyone did, we were just too polite to say so.”

“I wasn’t lying,” Harry said harshly. “And I’m not lying now, either.”

Draco cringed. “I—I didn’t say you were,” he mumbled.

He was sitting near the others—Vincent Crabbe, and Gregory Goyle, and Theodore Nott—the other boys whose fathers had come in their silver masks and their black robes when Voldemort had summoned them to his side. They were all watching Harry nervously, but he couldn’t see any sign of guilt on their features—and why should he? They didn’t know their fathers had been there that night, that he had seen them. Harry wondered how much they knew already, wondered which of them knew their fathers were Death Eaters, which of them had no idea....

His mind flashed back, suddenly, to that night two years ago in the Chamber of Secrets when Draco had told the adolescent memory of young Lord Voldemort that his father—and Goyle’s father too, he remembered—had been Death Eaters. At the time Harry had been sure it was a lie, just a wild bluff designed to stall Voldemort, to keep him from killing them all long enough for rescue to come...but it hadn’t been, had it? That had been the truth, and Harry had been too blind to see it.

But he knew, now. Lucius Malfoy was a Death Eater, had always been a Death Eater; had probably been out there in a mask on the night of the Quidditch World Cup...no wonder Draco had wanted to go and watch, no wonder he had though the torment of the Roberts family had been all in good fun....

His best friend’s father was a Death Eater and he, Harry, had been too stupid to see it.

Did Sirius know? He had never seemed to like Draco, to trust him; had certainly never trusted Draco’s parents...so why hadn’t he told Harry? Why hadn’t he warned him? Why hadn’t _anyone_ warned him?

Harry wondered if this was what his parents had felt, in the moments before they had died: the sudden sick, sure knowledge that one of their best friends had betrayed them….

Suddenly swamped by a flush of anger, Harry lurched to his feet and gave the nearest table a kick. “Well just shut-up, then!” he snarled. “All of you—believing what that horrible Skeeter woman writes, laughing at me when you think I’m not looking, lying to me—you can just shut-up!” Several people yelped and they all scrambled out of his way as he shouldered forward through the crowd. He stopped in front of Draco, Crabbe, Goyle, and Theodore. They looked up at him silently, wide-eyed and pallid.

“I—we didn’t—” Draco stammered.

“Just leave me alone,” Harry snapped. He spun on his heel and stomped down the stairs to the fourth year boys’ dormitory. He tore his robes off, flung them across the room, slammed his glasses down on his nightstand so hard one of the lenses cracked, yanked his pajamas on over his head, and climbed into bed. He pulled the hangings shut with such violence that they were ripped from the bed and fell in a dusty pile to the floor. Harry snarled, got out his wand, repaired the bed hangings, and pulled them shut around him.

He threw himself down on his pillows, seething. His hand was still tight around his wand and his heart was pounding. Images of the graveyard swam sickeningly in front of his eyes, interspersed with memories of his friends—laughing together on the Hogwarts Express, joking behind Professor Trelawney’s back, scaring the Gryffindors away from the Shrieking Shack, sharing piles of sweets from Honeydukes, watching the dancers together at the Yule Ball, sneaking through the castle hallways under Harry’s Invisibility Cloak, drinking butterbeer together in the Three Broomsticks…and threading among everything the high, cold laugh of Lord Voldemort, and Lucius Malfoy’s gray eyes looking away while Harry screamed….

Three sets of tentative footsteps crept down the stone staircase, two heavy and one sharp and light. All three stopped near the curtains of his bed. “Harry?” someone whispered tentatively.

Harry tightened his grip on his wand and said nothing.

“D’you think he—?”

“Shh, Goyle! He’s—he’s probably just tired…if he really saw the D—the Dark Lord….”

“S’not like he ain’t seen him before….”

“Shut-up, Goyle! Just—just go to bed! We can…we can ask Harry more about it in the morning….”

Two sets of footsteps—the heavy ones—plodded away to their own beds and Harry heard the rustle of fabric as Crabbe and Goyle changed into their pajamas, the creak of springs as they settled into bed.

Several minutes passed before the third set of footsteps finally walked away.

Harry rolled over and stared, sightless, at the green curtains overhead. How much did they know? he wondered. How much could he bring himself to tell them?

Eventually the soft sound of Crabbe snoring filled the room. Harry pulled a pillow over his head more to shut out his thoughts than to muffle the familiar nose. Eventually, between one quiet rumble and the next, Harry fell asleep.


	35. The Beginning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This section contains several sporadic excerpts from Chapter Thirty-Seven reaching from page 716 to page 734 of the American hardcover edition.

Morning came all too early, and with it, demands for answers and explanations.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Harry said firmly, glaring at his friends over heaping plates of eggs, toast, and—save in Goyle’s case—fat, greasy sausages. “He’s back, it was horrible, I survived. End of story.”

“Oh come on,” Draco wheedled, “you’ve got to give us more than that, Harry, please….”

“You want to know more?” Harry snapped. “Go find Voldemort and ask him.”

That shut them up. Harry couldn’t even bring himself to feel guilty at the way they all shuddered. For all he knew, they would be sharing tea and sandwiches with the Dark Lord in less than a week. Let them get the full story out of their dads, if they cared to talk about it…he, Harry, was done telling the tale.

“But…but how did you escape him? _Again?”_ Draco sounded breathless. “Nobody else has _ever….”_

Ordinarily, being looked at with such awe would have been all the motivation Harry needed to keep talking—but not today. If his friends wanted answers so badly, they could start by sharing what they knew about their fathers with _him_. Maybe he’d change his mind about talking then, but otherwise….

“I just did, all right?” Harry glared at all three of them, although only Draco had asked; Crabbe and Goyle were too busy eating. “Now, d’you want to go down and see if the Quidditch pitch has been fixed yet, or do you want to keep whining? Because I’m going to the Quidditch pitch. You can come too—but only if you stop talking about Voldemort.”

They all shuddered. “Fine,” Draco muttered mutinously (probably giving-in because he was anticipating hearing the whole story from his dad soon, Harry thought sourly), “but I don’t think it’s very fair, you not even telling _us_ the details. We’re your best friends, after all.”

Harry took a long drink of pumpkin juice so he wouldn’t have to answer.

 

When he looked back, even a month later, Harry found that certain moments of that last week at Hogwarts stood out in his mind like sharp-edged glass.

There was Cedric coming up to him, freshly-opened letter in his hand, his gray eyes gleaming, to say, “Just heard back from mum and dad, Harry, and they’re on board—knew they would be. Dad’s going to scout-out the Ministry for other folks who aren’t keen on buying into Fudge’s bull, pass their names on to Dumbledore. We might have a whole resistance going there soon—and wouldn’t that be rich?” He laughed. “Fudge was worried about Dumbledore wanting to destabilize the Ministry, which was a load of pixie droppings, but now, because of him, that’s exactly what we’re going to have to do!”

Cedric had walked off shaking his head, looking more energized than Harry could remember ever seeing him outside the Quidditch pitch.

There was his conversation with Professor Snape, looking as sullen and sallow as ever, the day after Harry left the hospital wing. Snape had refused to answer any questions about where he had been, what he had been doing for Dumbledore; he had drawn Harry aside for a few terse, quiet words, checking to see if Harry felt unsafe in his dormitory. Harry had been able to answer honestly in the negative; while being around his friends these days was tense, he wasn’t afraid that any of them were going to hurt him. He tried to ask more about what Snape had said to him that night in the hospital wing, but Snape had cut him off and swept away without another word, and Harry hadn’t been able to catch the Potions Master alone since.

There was Cho coming up to him after breakfast, her eyes glittering with unshed tears, free of her usual crowd of girls, saying firmly, “I believe you, you know, Harry. I know some people are saying you’re making it all up, but I know you aren’t. I know he’s really back. If there’s—if there’s anything I can do….” She had shaken her head and hurried away before Harry could answer, but her words had lent a spring to his step for days.

There was Viktor Krum, making a point of sitting next to Harry in the Great Hall for every meal, glowering at anyone who tried to pester him. Whenever anyone sneered about Harry telling lies, Krum would snarl at them until they went away again. The other Durmstrang students were more wary, keeping their distance from Harry and eyeing him uneasily from the far end of the Slytherin table. Harry didn’t want to ask Viktor how the talk with his classmates had gone; he thought he could probably guess.

There was Fleur, rounding a corner furiously, striding straight up to Harry and grabbing him by both hands. She had said something in French too fast for Harry to make out, kissed him on both cheeks again, and announced loudly, “I zink it is disgraceful, some people being too stupid or selfish to acknowledge ze truth! I zink it is cowardly, zem wishing to hide zair ‘eads in ze sands, as if zat will somehow make zings better! Ha! You are very brave, ‘Arry Potter, and I am proud to stand with you!” Then she had kissed him again and swept away in a cloud of silvery hair and righteous indignation. Harry had gone about in a daze for several minutes after that, until Hermione shouted in his ear and jolted him back to earth.

No one saw much of anything of Dumbledore; he had been absent at every meal, and in the few glimpses Harry caught of him in the corridors, Dumbledore had always been sweeping along at a great pace, usually thick in conversation with Professors Snape or McGonagall. Harry had tried three times to get his attention without result, then given up. He was sure that when Dumbledore wanted to find him, he would. Until then, Harry would just have to wait.

Most people, he noticed, were skirting him in the corridors, avoiding his eyes. Some whispered behind their hands as he passed. He guessed that many of them had believed Rita Skeeter’s article about how disturbed and possibly dangerous he was. Perhaps they thought that he had made-up the whole story of Voldemort’s resurrection in a bid for attention. Perhaps they were formulating their own theories of how he had won the Triwizard Tournament. Perhaps they even suspected that he and Voldemort were secretly in league—an idea he had overheard three Gryffindor third years whispering about one day as they walked in to breakfast, unaware that Harry was right behind him—and that his story of dueling and escaping from the Dark Lord was just a cover. He found he didn’t care very much. He liked it best when he was with Hermione, or Cho and Cedric, or Ginny. They talked only a little about what was going on in the world; he felt like they were all of them waiting for some sign, some word, of what was going on outside Hogwarts—and that it was useless to speculate about what might be coming until they knew anything for certain.

He refused to avoid his other friends, although there was a tight, constant current of tension, which Harry did his best to ignore. He sensed that things between himself, Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle were about to change. Instead of hurrying that along, Harry deliberately stuck to old, safe topics, like Quidditch or schoolwork or games of Exploding Snap. The others made no further effort to talk with him about Voldemort, or Death Eaters, or their parents. Harry tried to make his time with them linger, not wanting to think about what their future held.

When he needed a break from the tension, he went to talk to Hagrid, walking down to his cabin on Thursday afternoon. It was a bright and sunny day; Fang bounded out of the open door as Harry approached, barking and wagging his tail madly.

“Who’s that?” called Hagrid, coming to the door. _“Harry!”_

He strode out to meet him, pulled Harry into a one-armed hug, ruffled his hair, and said, “Good ter see yeh, mate. Good ter see yeh.”

Harry saw two bucket-size cups and saucers on the wooden table in front of the fireplace when he entered Hagrid’s cabin.

“Bin havin’ a cuppa with Olympe,” Hagrid said. “She’s jus’ let.”

Harry frowned. “You mean Madame Maxime?” he said.

Hagrid grinned and nodded. “’Course I do,” he said.

Harry raised an eyebrow. “So you two have sorted things out, have you?” he asked.

“Dunno what yeh’re talkin’ about,” said Hagrid airily, fetching another cup from the dresser. When he had made tea and produced a plate of doughy cookies, he leaned back in his chair and surveyed Harry closely through his beetle-black eyes.

“You doin’ all righ’?” Hagrid asked gently.

“Yeah, of course,” Harry lied. “Everything’s fine.”

“No it ain’t,” said Hagrid. “’Course it ain’t. But yeh’ll work it out.”

Harry said nothing.

“Knew he was goin’ ter come back,” said Hagrid, and Harry looked up at him, shocked. “Known it fer years, Harry. Knew he was out there, bidin’ his time. It had ter happen. Well, now it has, an’ we’ll jus’ have ter get on with it. We’ll fight. Migh’ be able ter stop him before he gets a good hold. That’s Dumbledore’s plan, anyway. Great man, Dumbledore. ‘S long as we’ve got him, I’m not too worried.”

Hagrid raised his bushy eyebrows at the disbelieving expression on Harry’s face.

“No good sittin’ worryin’ abou’ it,” he said. “What’s comin’ will come, an’ we’ll meet it when it does. Dumbledore told me what yeh did, Harry.”

Hagrid’s chest swelled as he looked at Harry.

“Yeh did as much as yer father would’ve done, an’ I can give yeh no higher praise than that.”

Harry smiled back at him. It was the first time in days he hadn’t felt guilty about smiling. “What’s Dumbledore asked you to do, Hagrid?” he asked. “He sent Professor McGonagall to ask you and Madame Maxime to meet him the night Voldemort came back.” Hagrid flinched at the name, but Harry pretended not to notice. He was getting good at pretending. “What did he want to talk to you about that was so important?”

“Got a little job fer me over the summer,” said Hagrid. “Secret, though. I’m not s’pposed ter talk abou’ it, no, not even ter yeh, Harry. Olympe—Madame Maxime ter you—might be comin’ with me. I think she will. Think I got her persuaded.”

“Is it to do with Voldemort?”

Another flinch that Harry pretended not to see.

“Migh’ be,” Hagrid said evasively. “Now…what would yeh say ter comin’ out ter visit the las’ skrewt with me? I was jokin’—jokin’!” he added hastily, seeing the look on Harry’s face.

 

It was with an unsettled heart that Harry packed his trunk down in the dormitory on the night before his return to Privet Drive. He was dreading the Leaving Feast, which would doubtless involve a celebration of his winning of the Triwizard Tournament. When Harry had first touched the Cup, his head had been filled with visions of him being paraded, triumphant, in front of the school, everyone applauding. He hadn’t thought that he would ever be sick of being congratulated for his victory—but the Triwizard Tournament felt like something that had happened a lifetime ago. Harry had more important things on his mind now, and being reminded of the tournament felt like a distraction from what really mattered: Voldemort. He wasn’t looking forward to being forced to smile and pretend to care while everybody congratulated him. He wanted to move on to whatever came next, to whatever they had to do to stop Voldemort, not dwell on some stupid victory speech.

When he, Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle entered the Hall, they saw at once that the usual decorations were missing. The Great Hall was normally decorated with the winning House’s colors for the Leaving Feast. Tonight, however, there were banners for all four houses, and another larger one that showed the crest of Hogwarts behind the staff table. They were the same decorations that had hung there to welcome the Durmstrang and Beauxbatons students to the school so many months ago.

The real Mad-Eye Moody was at the staff table now, his wooden leg and his magical eye back in place. He was extremely twitchy, jumping every time someone spoke to him. Harry couldn’t blame him; Moody’s fear of attack was bound to have been increased by his ten-month imprisonment in his own trunk. Professor Karkaroff’s chair was empty. Harry wondered, as he sat down with the Durmstrang students and the other Slytherins, where Karkaroff was now, and whether Voldemort had caught up with him.

Madame Maxime was still there. She was sitting next to Hagrid. They were talking quietly together. Further along the table, sitting next to Professor McGonagall, was Professor Snape. His eyes lingered on Harry for a moment as Harry looked at him. His expression was difficult to read. He looked as sour and unpleasant as ever. Harry continued to watch him, long after Snape had looked away.

What was it that Snape had done on Dumbledore’s orders, the night that Voldemort had returned? If only he had given Harry a hint! He had been their spy, Dumbledore had said so in the Pensieve. Snape had turned spy against Voldemort, “at great personal risk.” Was that the job he had taken up again? Had he made contact with the Death Eaters, perhaps? Pretended that he had never really gone over to Dumbledore, that he had been, like Voldemort himself—like Misters Malfoy, Crabbe, Goyle, and Nott—biding his time?

Harry’s musings were ended by Professor Dumbledore, who stood up at the staff table. The Great Hall, which had been even louder than it usually was at the Leaving Feast, became very quiet.

“The end,” said Dumbledore, looking around at them all, “of another year.”

He paused, and his eyes fell upon the Slytherin table. Harry felt as though Dumbledore was looking straight at him.

“There is much I would like to say to you all tonight,” said Dumbledore. “Chief among these things is to confirm the rumors that you have all been hearing this last week: yes, Lord Voldemort is, indeed, back.”

A panicked whisper swept the Great Hall. People were staring at Dumbledore in disbelief, in horror. He looked perfectly calm as he watched them mutter themselves into silence.

“The Ministry of Magic,” Dumbledore continued, “does not wish me to tell you this. It is possible that some of your parents will be horrified that I have done so—either because they will not believe that Lord Voldemort has returned, or because they think I should not tell you so, young as you are. It is my belief, however, that the truth is generally preferably to lies, and that any attempt to pretend that Voldemort has not returned will only place you all in greater danger.”

Stunned and frightened, every face in the Hall was turned toward Dumbledore.

“There is somebody else who must be mentioned in connection with Lord Voldemort’s return,” Dumbledore went on. “I am talking, of course, about Harry Potter.”

A kind of ripple crossed the Great Hall as a few heads turned in Harry’s direction before flicking back to face Dumbledore.

“Harry Potter was targeted by Lord Voldemort, as he has been targeted by him before. That is where Harry was taken when he touched the Triwizard Cup in the maze: to the site of Voldemort’s resurrection, where he was forced to watch the Dark Lord rise again. Harry showed extraordinary bravery and fortitude in facing Lord Voldemort. He escaped, as he escaped him once before, and returned to us with word of what he had witnessed. We cannot imagine that Lord Voldemort wanted us to know that he was back so quickly, and for that knowledge we are all of us in debt to Harry Potter.”

Dumbledore raised his glass, met Harry’s eyes gravely, and drank a silent toast. Around the Hall a few people—Viktor, Fleur, Cedric; Hermione, Ron, and Ginny; Neville; Cho; even dreamy-eyed Luna Lovegood—raised their glasses as well. Harry saw other faces, other people he did not know well, stand and drink to him. Most of the Slytherin Quidditch team rose; so did the Hufflepuffs, following their captain; and several Ravenclaw girls sitting near Cho. Harry stayed carefully facing forward, not looking back to see whether any of his friends at the Slytherin table had stood or not.

When everyone had resumed their seats, Dumbledore continued, “I do not wish to make light of Harry’s victory in the Triwizard Tournament this year, of course. All four of our champions performed admirably, rising to the challenges they were faced with and surmounting them. Harry, in particular—younger, less trained, and unwillingly entered—deserves praise for his victory, and under other circumstances, we would be celebrating whole-heartedly tonight. However, the Triwizard Tournament was always about more than mere competition. The real aim of this tournament was to further and promote magical understanding. In the light of what has happened—of Lord Voldemort’s return—such ties are more important than ever before, and I think that Harry will forgive me for dwelling more upon those than upon his most impressive performance last Friday.”

Dumbledore looked from Madame Maxime and Hagrid, to Fleur Delacour and her fellow Beauxbatons students, to Viktor Krum and the Durmstrangs at the Slytherin table with Harry.

“Every guest in this Hall,” said Dumbledore, and his eyes lingered upon the Durmstrang students, “will be welcomed back here at any time, should they wish to come. I say to you all, once again—in the light of Lord Voldemort’s return, we are only as strong as we are united, as weak as we are divided. Lord Voldemort’s gift for spreading discord and enmity is very great. We can fight it only by showing an equally strong bond of friendship and trust. Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open.

“It is my belief—and never have I so hoped that I am mistaken—that we are all facing dark and difficult times. Some of you in this Hall have already suffered directly at the hands of Lord Voldemort. Many of your families have been torn asunder. Many of your friendships may be on the verge of fragmenting under the pressures of fear and what no doubt feels like prudence—but I tell you now, students, that casting aside your bonds with friends or classmates out of concern for your own skin is not prudence.” Dumbledore shook his silvery head. “It is foolishness, short-sighted at the best and dangerous at worst, for when we are faced with threats of such a magnitude, there is no power better able to shield us from harm than that of friendship and love.

“Keep your friends close, all of you, and protect each other as best you can. The worst, I fear, is soon to come.”

 

Harry’s trunk was packed; Hedwig was back in her cage on top of it. He and his friends were waiting in the crowded entrance hall with the rest of the fourth years for the carriages that would take them back to Hogsmeade station. It was another beautiful summer’s day. He supposed that Privet Drive would be hot and leafy, its flower beds a riot of color, when he arrived there that evening. The thought gave him no pleasure at all.

“’Arry!”

He looked around. Fleur Delacour was hurrying up the stone steps into the castle. Beyond her, far across the grounds, Harry could see Hagrid helping Madame Maxime to back two of the giant horses into their harness. The Beauxbatons carriage was about to take off.

“We will see each uzzer again, I know,” said Fleur as she reached him, holding out her hand. “I am ‘oping to get a job ‘ere, to improve my Eenglish.”

“Oh, but it—it’s so good already,” Daphne Greengrass said, blushing furiously. Morag MagDougal, standing next to her, giggled, but Pansy Parkinson, on Daphne’s other side, scowled. Fleur smiled at all the girls before turning back to Harry and Draco.

“Gabrielle was sorry not to get to speak to ze both of you more, after ze—after what ‘appened with ze tournament. She sends ‘er love.”

“Oh, well,” Draco shrugged awkwardly, “that’s nice of her.”

“I meant what I said before, too,” Fleur said, her pretty eyes blazing as she met Harry’s gaze.

He nodded. “I know,” he said. “Thanks.”

“Good-bye, ‘Arry,” said Fleur, turning to go. “It ‘az been a pleasure meeting you both.”

Harry’s spirits couldn’t help but lift slightly as he watched Fleur hurry back across the lawns to Madame Maxime, her silvery hair rippling in the sunlight.

Harry saw Viktor Krum coming his way, having just said goodbye to Hermione and her friends in Gryffindor. He watched, smirking to himself, as Viktor doubled-back to sign a scrap of parchment for Ron.

“I haff come to say good-bye,” Viktor said after leaving the Gryffindors a second time.

He shook hands with all of them, making Daphne and Pansy giggle and Morag’s pasty cheeks blaze crimson. Draco puffed-up his chest and looked around to make sure everyone was watching.

“Good-bye,” Harry said. “And good, er—good luck. Have you got a new headmaster yet?”

Viktor shrugged. “I am not going back to Durmstrang next year,” he said, “it does not matter to me who they get to teach there now. I am done with school—and I haff other things to do.” He nodded grimly to Harry, cursorily to the others, and turned to slouch off back to the Durmstrang ship.

“You think they can sail that thing without Karkaroff?” Goyle asked.

Crabbe perked-up. “Wanna go watch and see if it sinks?” he said.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Draco sneered, “they aren’t going to sink. Besides, there’s no time.”

He pointed at the horseless carriages that were now trundling toward them up the drive.

“Aw,” said Crabbe, pouting as he climbed in after the others.

 

The weather could not have been more different on the journey back to King’s Cross than it had been on their way to Hogwarts the previous September. There wasn’t a single cloud in the sky. Harry, Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle had managed to get a compartment to themselves of course, although Pansy kept flitting back and forth between sitting with them and joining her other friends in the compartment across the way. Harry didn’t mind; her visits gave him an excuse not to say anything important. As they drew closer and closer to London, Harry’s stomach started to churn, and he bought half of what he usually did from the lunch trolley. He knew that his idyllic break from reality was about to come to an end; all too soon, he would have to face the facts about what—and who—he had seen that night in the graveyard.

When Hermione Granger stepped into their compartment in Pansy’s wake shortly after lunch, Harry thought the moment was coming for him sooner than he had planned. She was carrying a copy of the _Daily Prophet_. His stomach gave a lurch as she sat down across from him, her face very serious beneath its crown of bushy hair.

“I don’t know if you saw the paper yet today—” she began, but all four of them were already shaking their heads.

“Anything about the Dark Lord’s return in there?” Draco asked anxiously.

Harry, remembering that he had given Fudge the names of several Death Eaters—although not that of Draco’s father—held his breath, worried that the _Prophet_ had decided to print his accusations. He glanced sideways at Crabbe and Goyle, who were licking icing off their thick fingers with evident concentration. He was sure that no matter how absorbed they seemed in their feast, they would notice if Hermione started talking about their dads being accused of being Death Eaters by Harry—

But she shook her head. “There’s nothing in there. You can look for yourself, but there’s nothing at all. I’ve been checking every day—”

“Us, too,” Draco said. “But we didn’t have time this morning. You’re sure there’s nothing?”

Hermione shook her head. “If you ask me, Fudge is forcing them to keep quiet.”

“Obviously,” said Draco. “I’m just surprised that he’s going that route. I would have expected him to take the opportunity to make Harry out to be even more of a nutter than the _Prophet_ has already. Rita Skeeter should be going wild at the prospect.” He made a face.

Harry slumped back in his seat. “He’ll never keep Rita quiet for long,” he said gloomily. “Not on a story like this.”

“Oh, Rita hasn’t written anything at all since the third task,” said Hermione in an oddly constrained voice. “As a matter of fact,” she added, her voice now trembling slightly, “Rita Skeeter isn’t going to be writing anything at all for a while. Not unless she wants me to spill the beans on _her.”_

“What beans?” Crabbe said, looking up quickly in case someone had brought more food along.

“I found out how she was listening in on private conversations when she wasn’t supposed to be coming onto the grounds,” said Hermione in a rush.

Harry had the impression that Hermione had been dying to tell someone this for days, but that she had wanted to wait for a dramatic moment.

“How was she doing it?” said Harry at once.

“How did you figure it out?” said Draco, frowning at her suspiciously.

“Well, it was you, really, who gave me the idea, Harry,” she said, “you and—er—that Lovegood girl.”

“Really?” said Harry, perplexed. “How?”

“ _Bugging,”_ said Hermione happily.

“But you said that didn’t work—”

“Oh not _electronic_ bugs,” said Hermione.

“What kinda bugs’re elk-tric—?” Goyle began, but the others shushed him so Hermione could continue.

“No, you see…Rita Skeeter”—Hermione’s voice trembled with quiet triumph— “is an unregistered Animagus.”

Draco started to laugh. “Come off it, Granger,” he said, “that’s the most ridiculous idea yet—”

“She can turn—”

Hermione pulled a small sealed glass jar out of her bag.

“—into a beetle.”

Draco abruptly stopped laughing.

“You’re not serious,” he breathed, leaning in for a closer look at the bug.

“Is that—is that really—?” said Harry, peering inside.

“Oh yes it is,” said Hermione happily, brandishing the jar at them.

Inside were a few twigs and leaves and one large, fat beetle.

“You have got to be pulling our legs,” said Draco, grabbing the jar and turning it around for a better look. The beetle scuttled frantically as the jar’s contents tipped and slid.

“No, I’m not,” said Hermione, beaming. “I caught her on the windowsill in the hospital wing. Look very closely, and you’ll notice the marking around her antennae are exactly like those foul glasses she wears.”

Harry looked and saw that she was quite right. He also remembered something.

“There was a beetle on the statue the night Luna and I heard Hagrid telling Madame Maxime about his mum! Luna kept staring at it, like it was the most interesting bug she’d ever seen. She _said_ it was listening….”

“Exactly,” said Hermione. “And Viktor pulled a beetle out of my hair after we’d had our conversation by the lake. And it wouldn’t have been hard for a beetle to slip into the greenhouse the day your scar hurt. Nobody would have looked twice at another bug crawling around in there. She’s been buzzing around for stories all year.”

“That explains how she kept getting onto the grounds to get interviews with people,” Draco said slowly, staring hard at the beetle. “I wonder if Greengrass’s little sister knew Skeeter could turn into a beetle. She’s only a second year, she might not have realized it was anything special…or illegal….”

Hermione took the glass jar back from Draco and smiled at the beetle, which buzzed angrily against the glass.

“I’ve told her I’ll let her out when we get back to London,” said Hermione. “I’ve put an Unbreakable Charm on the jar, you see, so she can’t transform.”

“Why let her out at all?” said Draco, shrugging.

Hermione rolled her eyes. “I can’t keep her in there _forever,”_ she said. “That would be _horrible.”_

“No less than she deserves,” Draco observed.

Hermione tossed her hair. “Well, I’ve also told her she’s to keep her quill to herself for a whole year. See if she can’t break the habit of writing horrible lies about people.”

“Still seems like a waste to me,” Draco said, but Hermione pretended not to hear him. Smiling serenely, she placed the beetle back into her schoolbag.

“Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that you don’t need to worry about Rita Skeeter any more, Harry.” Hermione walked back to her compartment, smugly patting the bag by her side.

“At least not for a year,” said Draco, still looking sulky.

“A lot can change in a year,” said Harry, feeling sick again.

Draco shrugged. “True,” he said. “But if it’d been me, I’d have made sure to get more out of Skeeter than just a promise not to make things _worse_. I mean—why not force her to undo some of the damage she’s done, right?”

Harry shrugged. “I doubt Fudge would let the _Daily Prophet_ print anything good about me right now anyway, even if Rita wrote it,” he said.

“True,” Draco mused, “but there are other news outlets—none as respected or wide-reaching as the _Prophet_ , of course, but we might be able to do something….”

He spent the rest of the journey proposing possible solutions to the problem of Harry’s damaged reputation. Harry grunted noncommittally, hardly listening. Every minute was taking them closer to the end of the journey, to the inevitable confrontation with the truth. Harry wished it could have gone on all summer, their trip back from Hogwarts, that he would never arrive at King’s Cross…but as he had learned the hard way that year, time will not slow down when something unpleasant lies ahead, and all too soon, the Hogwarts Express was pulling in at platform nine and three-quarters. The usual confusion and noise filled the corridors as the students began to disembark. Harry pretended that he needed to retie his shoe, letting his friends draw ahead of him.

He waited until the train had almost emptied before he picked up his trunk and Hedwig’s cage and followed the last of the lingering crowd out through the magical barrier that separated platform nine and three-quarters from the rest of King’s Cross station.

Uncle Vernon was waiting for him, looking every bit as mustached and furious as he had looked when Harry had left with the Malfoys for the Quidditch World Cup. To his relief, there was no sign of any of his friends’ parents still lingering on the other side of the barrier. Harry pushed his cart over to Uncle Vernon and followed him silently out to the parking lot. He wondered what sort of conversations his friends might be having, even now, with their parents; wondered if they had been told yet about that night in the graveyard, when Harry had been meant to die…. He wondered what their letters to him this summer would say. Then he shook his head, trying to put the thoughts out of his mind.

As Hagrid had said, what would come, would come…and he would have to meet it when it did.

**THE END**

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all once again for coming along with me on Harry's snakier journey so far. I hope you stick around for the next volume, _Harry Potter and the Seer's Prophecy_. It will as ever be several months until I've gotten enough of the book written-out to be ready to post anything, but I do promise to continue the story--eventually! (I can't abandon the story now that we're finally breaking free to _really_ let this divergence go wild, can I?) In the meantime, I will recommend my new favorite story about magical schools: _When The Letter Comes_ by Sara Fox, which you can read online for free [here](https://www.thebooksmugglers.com/2018/05/when-the-letter-comes-by-sara-fox.html) or purchase in either ebook or paperback format [here](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07KDXFPF6/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1).
> 
>  **ETA:** Oops it looks like the ebook and paperbook both will only be available until _the end of December 2018_ so if you think you want a copy (and I really think you do!) DON'T DELAY!
> 
> If you have any questions about _Dark Mark_ , or suggestions for improvements or alterations (either to past volumes or regarding plans for the next part), I would love to hear them, or any other thoughts you have about the series so far. Knowing what parts worked best for people, and what parts didn't, is always a great help when working on the next part. I don't want to say too much about _Seer's Prophecy_ and spoil anything of course, but I'll do my best to answer what I can! Thank you all so much for reading. Your lovely comments and kudos really do make this little experiment worthwhile.


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